


So Long As There's Mercy

by LittleDesertFlower



Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Decontextualized Spoilers, Home, Loss, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Moral Dilemmas, Multi, Not Beta Read, Running Away, Season/Series 08, Season/Series 09, Season/Series 10, Season/Series 12, Time War (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 126,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26356117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: When not even time can heal all wounds, the Doctor breaks like never before. Together with Missy, both will attempt to rebuild their life, joined by faces old and new, and slowly come to confront their oldest enemy.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1908595
Comments: 20
Kudos: 12





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Decontextualized spoilers means that, for the post part, I use elements from series 8-12 detached from the original plot-related spoilers.
> 
> From series 12 I only use minor characters (or aesthetics for the mains and some settings), and from series 8-10 I borrow a few plot elements/characters and twist them into new narratives.  
> • Series 8 (Dark Water)  
> • Series 9 (Face the Raven)  
> • Series 10 (The Pilot, World Enough and Time)  
> • Series 12 (Fugitive of the Judoon)  
> It is AU, so small canon details might change from time to time to go with the bigger changes.
> 
> [I wouldn’t recommend reading unless familiar with series 8 and 9, at least; those will be the most spoiler-heavy in a more in-your-face way]

At this point, it’s possible that half of the hotel thinks he’s as dead as they are. He’s not sure what the other half thinks. Probably something close enough to the truth. That he and their… fake android helper sit in the garden, mingling, way too often.

Close enough because the mingling is usually only a two-way activity. Sometimes it includes saying hello to other guests. Most times it includes Missy jumping to her feet to play good parent to somebody who isn’t coping well. It always involves sitting on one of those wooden benches near the fountain and almost holding hands.

Someone’s fingers will nervously tap on the wood, sliding one third of an inch closer. The other will snort to themselves, thinking _just do it, I’m not going to break._ But the Doctor is pretty sure that Missy doesn’t hold his hand, slide hers onto his own, as often as she means to because he’s often the kind of person who flinches away at warning: sudden hand in vicinity _._ And he doesn’t play games. It’s hard enough to know what to do with his hands half the time.

Being in a body is weird. Words. Hands. Knees. Words again. Keeping up with it is worse.

“So, d’you think you’ll _ever_ settle down?” Missy asks him. On a wooden bench, in the heart of her garden. Almost holding hands.

“Ask a harder question, will you?” the Doctor says. “On a technicality, we’re already settled on this very nice—”

“I don’t work with technicalities. Hard question, easy yes-or-no answer. _Humor_ me.” She grins and blinks slowly in his direction.

Words. Hands. Knees. _Signals._ Being in a body, being alive in a body. It should come with instructions sometimes. He’d appreciate it. Not that he’d end up doing more than just skimming through. Too much text bamboozles the brain and confuses the hearts.

“Define settling down. Human settling down? As in… house, mortgage?” He wrinkles his nose. “Furniture?”

The concept doesn’t bring back good memories, exactly. It was a long life, the one he had in which he pretended there was a version of him that could _think_ of that without malfunctioning. The thought of carpets at the time burned him out.

“Why are you talking about this like you didn’t have a house back home?” Missy teases him. “ _With_ furniture.”

“Okay. Not human settling down. Which settling down, then?”

“Stopping somewhere,” Missy says. She’s not laughing now. “Building something. Not necessarily a house. But… something. A fish tank, if you will. The point of a house is having some place to return to after you’ve been gone for a time. Haven’t you ever wanted that? After, you know…”

And this is easy to answer. Relatively.

Some would argue he’s got that already. A TARDIS as a home. He lives and sleeps in the same giant spinning room that takes him away. But somewhere inside him he already knows that’s not the point. Home is fixed, its foundations deep into the earth, unshakable. That would be like a human calling a plane a house, a home.

Humans clap when the plane lands, and then they all get off, even the pilots. Nobody tucks themselves in whatever little space the seats allow and looks out the small round windows at night when they can’t sleep. Planes are transitional. And his TARDIS should be but isn’t. That’s still not the same as a home.

“Yeah, no. Not for me,” he says. “Still love the running.”

Short answer is no. Long answer is he can’t. Running is as much a coping mechanism as it’s his way of thinking himself forgiven.

“Anyway, how about you? Ever given it a thought, settling?” he asks her now.

“It’s been some time since it stopped being about the running for me.”

“Now it’s about the hotel, isn’t it?” he asks, careful enough to be soft about it.

Missy loses her grin, and the inherent sweetness in her eyes fuses into something else he can’t quite place. Lately, Missy becomes the space between emotions more often than not. That’s when the hand on the wooden bench, the hand that slides, is more his than hers.

“I keep remembering all these names… Every night, a few new ones. From so long ago. I thought—” She doesn’t finish the sentence and brings her hands, now curled into fists, onto her lap. She twitches her fingers together.

The Doctor looks up at her. She might have said it wasn’t about the running. But it never ceases to be, he knows that well. And if he knows anything about his old friend turned new, it’s that all she has endeavored to do since her latest regeneration is to find forgiveness in what she’s doing for what she once did.

He takes her hand now, right there in her lap.

“The hotel might stop being big enough one day, Missy. What will you do… when that happens?”

“There’s space-compression technology,” she says at once. The running, it is always about the running. About how much forgiveness one can find in it. “I’ll turn rooms into buildings if I have to. I’m a Time Lord, remember? I’m _still_ a Time Lord, I’ll either find remnants of that technology or create it myself from scratch. You know I can.”

There’s tears in her eyes, not quite ready to be shed yet.

He squeezes her hand as gently as he can so as not to spook her into leaving.

“There’s nowhere you can go,” he says slowly, looking into her eyes, “nothing you can do… that will change your personal past. Nothing.”

“Time streams,” she just says.

“Time streams—” He nods. “—crossing.”

Across the garden, then, a figure approaches in long strides and panting breaths. They call Missy’s name amidst the hedges. Loud, hurrying her to show herself if she’s there.

“What is the matter?” she says, recomposing her expression so quickly the Doctor sits there for a second, unable to understand until he just does. Sometimes the only way out is to rebuild yourself like nothing had been torn down at all inside you.

“Someone just faded away,” the newcomer informs her.

The Doctor and Missy stare at each other, then promptly head back into the house, following the resident’s own sprint without even pausing to assess the situation. Where they are, they don’t have to.

“What are the odds?” the Doctor asks.

“No odds in my house!” Missy admonishes him.

“No, but what are they?”

“Shut up and run!”

Too many corridors in this hotel. Too many. Square things that then twist and turn upwards in staircases that look all the same. Missy does like her red carpets and her wallpaper, but the fact that every single square foot of the hotel is identical to the next only makes the Doctor get lost quicker.

A door opens. It could be any door, to any bedroom. Nothing means anything anymore.

Missy is running out of space. A couple of beds per bedroom. They’re both unmade, slept in. With the little end tables occupied by memorabilia each person was able to keep, thanks to Missy’s TARDIS and her traveling back and forth to retrieve it.

The Doctor holds his breath.

“What were the odds?” he says.

“I didn’t even know he was doing that well…” Missy mutters.

The bed on the left will now be forever empty of the person who occupied it. Until Missy finds someone else to fill the space. Some other poor soul that connects her and the Doctor. That connects with misery and chaos and deserves a home to rest from it all.

Stumbling forward, the Doctor grabs a framed picture from the end table. He passes his fingers over the glass protecting it.

Clara Oswald and Danny Pink, smiling under the shade of one of the trees in their school’s courtyard.

The image of a _before._

He doesn’t even want to think of an _after._ But he supposes, after all, he has been living in it for a while now.


	2. Plant Planet

Clara misses that elementary-school question everybody used to ask. _Which weekday is your favorite?_ Because when she was that young, she didn’t care. They were all the same in her head. Mondays and Thursdays and what not. And her answer only reflected her knowledge of one of the seven parts of a whole week. But now Clara has something to say to that, and no one is asking.

Mondays are the beginning of a week that’s too long, no matter how she looks at it, and she never looks at it properly even if she tries.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are basically an extension of Monday, reduced to overly long morsels. And Friday is quite simply the last of too many hours before she can pretend the weekend is enough free time to rest.

But Wednesdays?

Clara actually smiles when the alarm goes off on Wednesdays. She dances a little to _Pretty Woman_ and hums along to the guitar solo. She lets it _play_ while she puts on her slippers and gets the coffee machine going.

Wednesdays are only a few hours of work and an infinite universe of possibilities afterwards. It doesn’t matter that the new math teacher is strict and wears high buns tighter than brand new pantyhose. And it certainty does not affect her in the slightest that now her life after work is a plus-one situation. Not on Wednesdays.

The bell rings and the students pick up their things and Clara looks out the window, seriously considering doing what she used to when she was a teen and just leaning against the glass like a schoolgirl with a crush. Who cares if she’s thirty? Who cares if her madman in a box turned out to be a little bit more than that? A little more than just plain lonely? It’s Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Clara stays behind in this classroom after the bell has rung. She waits by the window or at her desk, and pretends to be slow at getting her bag. Normally, between her wishing to be by the window and her taking her bag and coat, she has already heard it. The most wonderful sound in the world.

Even if the math teacher is strict, and not a soft-spoken man who would fake a terrible French accent and call her _Claire_ at night when they spoke on the phone, Clara waits. Because it’s Wednesday. And this is what she does on Wednesdays, what she’s always done on Wednesdays, when nobody else was looking.

But, eventually, the sun hides behind clouds and houses, and the clock ticks away moments that Clara should have spent somewhere else, reunited with _her_ math teacher. Or flying away towards new suns.

_So he forgot,_ she thinks as she puts on her coat. _Big deal._

It’s not the first time it happens.

But back then, the Doctor’s distractions didn’t have a name. Two hearts. Common history. Back then, Clara didn’t need her Wednesdays so desperately much. And, what’s worse, the Doctor knows that.

_At least… he_ should _know._

* * *

“So we agree?” Missy is sprawled all over her seat. Nobody who has ever flown in the TARDIS could understand how she’s keeping her balance there. “Best not to tell her for now?”

Even the Doctor, bound to the machine and the soul beneath it, has trouble keeping his feet steady and his hands where they should go.

“No, we don’t _agree_ ,” he says. “But I physically cannot walk right now in and tell her ‘I’m sorry, but your boyfriend just vanished. Kaput. Gone. Oh, and, by the way, want to see some planets?’”

Missy throws a hand back lazily. “It might cheer her up… It would cheer _me_ up.”

He lifts his head.

“In future, I’ll be sure to remember that the space-continuum can save you from eternal damnation,” he says, as the landing sequence is initiated. The decreasing noise only ever swallows his words for a second. “But Clara? _Clara_? She’s been acting all different types of non-Clara lately. Ever since… Danny.”

He shakes his head full of lustrous curly gray hair and spreads both hands on the console. He sighs and it seems that the TARDIS exhales her weary wheeze at the same time as him, settling on firm ground somewhere.

“No. I’ll… think of something. Yes. I always think of something.”

“Something other than ‘Clara, your boyfriend’s finally dead-dead’, I presume?” Missy says. “Which is… too blunt. Even for me.”

The Doctor paces away from the console.

“What would _you_ tell her? I’m all ears, please,” he says, sarcastically arching his big eyebrows. His steps end up taking him sideways, back into the same spot he just left by the materialization switch.

“‘I’m _sorry_ ,” Missy makes a deep and emphatic pause, “‘your boyfriend’s finally all dead.’ And _then_ some planets. As a treat.”

“We are living proof that time is required to find… a better phrasing of that sentence. I’m just going to have to work on it as we go. She’ll notice something’s off if I stay away much longer.”

“It’s honestly not that hard. Don’t you have cheat cards for this sort of scenario?” Missy stands up from her chair. It used to be just a chair, but since now Missy’s its only occupant, it might as well be all _hers._ Nobody else sits there. “Sometimes I wonder how on earth you’ve survived this long _and_ acquired the reputation that you have. You’re as functional as this TARDIS.”

She leans on the railing by the door, waiting.

“She’s a very old model!” the Doctor says.

“So are you!” She twirls, gifting him with a smile, and opens the door for him. “Come on, sweetheart. _I’ll_ be your cheat card.”

“That doesn’t ease my tremendous discomfort at what we’re about to do.”

The doors close behind them and the hum of the lonely TARDIS, left alone to wait, disappears in the frenetic low noises of the city. Cars in the streets, kids walking past and talking to each other much too loudly.

“Nothing does. Nothing _can_ ,” Missy says, teasing. “What was it you said to me? Something about the past, hmm? What is the present but the past in construction?”

“Don’t throw my own lines back at me…”

Missy stands on her tiptoes to brush back his hair. It curls the wrong way sometimes, especially in breeze that’s about to pick up.

That’s when they catch her. Clara Oswald, exiting the shops with a few bags in her arms.

Even when distraught and in the middle of her day, she still dresses for adventures she doesn’t know are coming. Because she’s always listening for that _sound_ that was supposed to come all Wednesdays and hasn’t, not for a while.

_A Wednesday. Definitely a Wednesday._ She had that promise once. Made by a younger version of this same person. So much more _everything._ So much less everything, too. Changes go both ways.

“Clara!” That man still opens his arms for her. In the distance, not because there’s a hug incoming.

The Doctor only hugs in the face of death to remind himself that while he cannot _die,_ others can and will, and it’s his penitence to stand by and watch with _I love you_ on the tip of his tongue and on the very surface of his skin, but never actually in his spoken word.

“Um… What are you doing here?” she asks. “It’s Saturday morning.”

The day shouldn’t matter, but it does.

At the Doctor’s silence and sudden pallor, Missy elbows him in the ribs. He still seems to be frozen in another time zone.

“Oh, you know,” Missy says, grinning. “Passing through. Some shopping,” she adds, when she notices Clara’s own bags. “We were running out of… onions. Onions are good.”

She elbows the Doctor again, this time a little more elegantly.

“And oil,” he says, almost as if he was an electronic being switched back on. He clears his throat. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Clara stares at him.

“I… _live_ here,” she says slowly. “Did you get the timing wrong or something?”

“No! No, no, no! Just doing the shopping! Some shopping before heading off to…” He looks at Missy, begging her to help him out with this unsolvable mystery of the spoken word. It’s almost comical.

Missy pats his chest with the back of her hand.

“The universe!”

“Off to the universe,” the Doctor autocompletes his own sentence—incomplete without Missy. “Would you like to come? It’s got planets!”

He pulls off one of those teethy smiles that Clara used to like because they were silly and absurd, proof that the Doctor might be old but still a bit of a dork at heart. Now she’s not all too sure what those smiles mean. Maybe they hide more than just forgotten childishness.

But she so wants a raincheck for those Wednesdays she spent watching the clock tick. Even if it’s at the cost of groceries and strange smiles she can’t interpret.

All to get back the thrill in her chest that drove her.

All to get _anything_ at all back inside her chest.

The hollow in there beats as well as a heart, but it isn’t.

Clara knows it isn’t.

“All right, let me just…” she says. “Go home and get these in the fridge. I’ll be a minute.”

Missy almost grabs her bags out of her hands.

“We’ve got a fridge aboard, worry not!”

“I wasn’t… worrying. I just want to take these home. I might forget them otherwise. And somebody else might be getting frozen ramen for dinner.”

She eyes them both for a second. They are toying away from her next question. Whatever it might be, because she hasn’t thought of it next.

Very, very strange indeed.

“You know what?” Clara says, shaking her head and laughing softly. “Yeah, okay. Off we go.”

Neither Doctor nor Missy so much as move or laugh or pretend to react at that, at the try at humor in her tone.

“Unless you wanted to buy your own groceries first. Isn’t that what you came for?”

Of course they didn’t.

“Nah,” he says. He purposely tries to walk next to her, to keep Missy to his other side. And he tries to do it in a way that she won’t notice. Which only makes her notice it more. “Later. I can live on a cheese wedge for half a week if I’ve got to. Plus, where we’re going… there’s this whole ecosystem based around what you humans call food, isn’t that neat? Makes me hungry just by thinking about it.”

As it turns out, he’s had the TARDIS neatly parked nearby. He and Missy immediately get rid of their coats and throw them on the chair. Missy regards that chair with absent longing before dumping the wrinkled mess of their outerwear on it and standing next to the console.

“Right, so…” Clara says, unsure of how to proceed. She tries to blink the blankness out of her mind. “Fridge.”

The bags have cut through the blood flow in her fingers.

“Want us to wait for you, dear?” Missy says. “Wouldn’t want you to bump against anything on the way to the kitchen during takeoff.”

Her arm is immediately around the Doctor’s shoulders in a fashion that feels strangely childish for the shape of her. She and the Doctor, they come in older bodies, much too old for the way they behave around each other sometimes, like they’re still kids in a backyard, making sandcastles under the evening sun.

“Or down the stairs that go to the kitchen,” the Doctor says.

He doesn’t brush Missy away. Clara remembers the days when he shunned all kinds of physical contact, after the regeneration. Like somebody had sapped away the energy that made him _her_ Doctor and he’d just turned into… a stranger she loved but couldn’t touch.

“You added stairs?”

“They add themselves sometimes,” he replies. “It’s complicated.”

Clara just nods and tries to find her way. A couple of weeks, and there’s mystery stairs. If they’d forgotten her for a month, for two months, would they have deleted her bedroom entirely?

“Can’t keep your TARDIS in line, can you, eh?” Missy is teasing him.

“Can’t keep anything, anybody in line. I just roll with the tide.”

“So much for the greatest mind in the universe.”

“Ooooh, the criteria for that…”

“They winged it. I’m very inclined to believe they winged it for you, smart isn’t your word.”

Even out of the corner of her eye, already far enough away, Clara sees.

The Doctor, under Missy’s arm, giving out one of his loud and long guffaws. He pinches Missy on her left side. They lean towards each other like old friends on a couch after a long tiring day of subway commutes.

_That woman right there, being pinched on the side, being laughed with?_ Clara thinks to herself. _That used to be me._

For a moment, she considers just staying here, in the shadows, and waiting to see how long it takes them to notice she’s not coming back. But where is the fun in being invisible?

Besides, her groceries are defrosting.

And her Wednesday is ticking away. A Wednesday in a Saturday. She can’t let it become the far end of the week.

The TARDIS gives a reassuring mechanic sigh all around her, and Clara moves along. Somewhere between corridor and stairs and kitchen, she hears them. No guffaws or high-pitched ‘smart isn’t your word’.

Whispers in the console room.

“…much time…”

“…not, absolutely not…”

The specifics of that are about as vast as the Doctor’s intellect.

The wide span of what might be being said without her is just another drop in an already filled glass.

She’s Clara Oswald, companion to the Doctor.

And she’s already lost too much to care about what two idiots make her sneak out to say behind her back.

* * *

When the Doctor had announced, proud like a child showing their newest drawing to an adult, that they were going to Plant Planet, Clara had admittedly not pictured anything this literal.

She’s seen supercomputers, gods, aliens in submarines, time itself, dinosaurs in London, a mummy on a train, a tree invasion. But a plant planet takes the cake.

“Entirely uninhabited,” Missy says under her parasol.

A pleasant shade of sunlight shines on the entire surface of the terrain. Whatever the laws of photosynthesis are in this corner of the universe, Clara supposes the basics must remain.

“Plants inhabit it,” the Doctor says.

“Plants aren’t intelligent lifeforms. They don’t count. They’re like end tables. Or vases. You don’t _write_ plants down as actual occupants of households.”

“Eat the fruit of the Plant Sim, Missy. See if you’re still an intelligent lifeform who counts as part of the household.”

The Doctor laughs quietly to himself at his own joke.

“Pardon?”

“Look around you!” he says, reaching out for the sky. “And tell me this… is uninhabited.”

“We’re the only anthropomorphic lifeforms around, so that’s a yes from me.”

Missy might not want to, but Clara does. Wednesdays are as green as the horizon. Is there even one? She thought she’d seen the entire Earth covered in trees, once, scared to so much as look up and find that the foliage had shielded the sky from the earth as well. But this is different, there is a balance to the chaos. Nothing is as tall to cloud the clouds, and nothing is as coily and thick that it drowns the soil.

It’s the green that’s a bit dizzying. So much of it. Even the soil itself looks more so than _brown,_ the brown she associates with growth and harvest, moisture and warmth. Even the sky, yellow enough, has tints of green.

They walk in what seems to be onward for a while. And it only seems to be onward for that very while. As soon as they lose sight of the TARDIS, onward might as well just be any other old direction.

“…the beauty of this is that it’s perfectly constructed, on the randomness of nature, to grow and decay in infinite shapes that consume and enhance each other until the whole planet _is_ nature itself,” the Doctor says, pushing a giant leaf out of his face. “A whole ecosystem in a nutshell.”

“How much of it is it like Earth’s?” Clara asks. “In terms of… sun, plant, soil, I mean.”

“Er—probably the basics. Maybe a base substance varies here or there. That happens.”

“Depends, too, on how many suns there are,” Missy says. “We had two going on at home and… freaky stuff used to grow in the greenhouses, remember?”

The both of them giggle in unison. They giggle about giant blossoms and a plant that tried to bite Missy’s whole hand off once, when they snuck in to steal food that hadn’t quite matured yet on its leaves.

One question. Clara just meant to ask one simple enough question, the answer to which she couldn’t have access to on her own. And it has turned into skating down memory lane as if it curved down into a slope that goes down forever.

“I wouldn’t even rule out bioluminescence,” the Doctor says to Clara, once the trap plant and Missy’s hand is fading out of his memory, but Clara has already taken a few steps forward. Onward. _Any_ ward.

“Yeah, we have that at home too,” she mutters, loud enough. “Sometimes.”

“Nothing the likes of which you might see here!”

The Doctor tries.

He crouches by a tiny thing, barely a stem with beautiful triangular leaves that have small lightning bolts all over. His fingers prick it slightly.

“Take this, for example,” he says. Clara only ever turns a little. Missy might as well crouch by him and offer her hand to let him probe the plant with. “In the night, brightest source of the tiniest light.”

His grin would once have made her go there, take those five steps between them, and dirty up her knees against soil and leaves.

The Doctor tries. But Clara has tried so hard for so long. Trying isn’t enough for her. _Try harder, damn it. Succeed!_

“Bioluminescence.” Missy laughs. “You do really read about the places you take us before you take us, don’t you? Just to be the greatest mind ever to leave Gallifrey, all impressive and all-knowing. But just _who_ are you trying to impress now, hm?”

The Doctor blushes. And Clara’s own cheeks burn, but not for the same reasons. Once, maybe.

He rises from the ground, Missy offering him her non-parasol hand.

“Nobody. It’s not like you people ever find _me_ impressive.”

“Not with dirt on your knees.”

“Ah, so you _do_ find me impressive sometimes.”

“ _Not_ with _dirt_ on your knees.”

“How, then?”

“I’m not telling you. Children present.” Missy giggles again.

“I’m honestly more offended about the _plants_ hearing. It’s their dirt, after all,” the Doctor says.

Clara ignores them. She’s thirty, they’re thousands of years old. She’s heard plenty of their flirting in recent times, they could honestly do better at it. Sometimes she’s almost sure they just do it because they can, not because… well, not because they’re getting at anything with it.

The three of them, like this… Have they really _done_ anything worth mentioning? With the Doctor, there was an Ice Warrior on a submarine and a mummy on the Orient Express. They solved the riddles together. With Missy thrown in the mix, they walk on world after world, just watching drops fall from clouds and marveling at the beauty condensed in it. At most, Clara remembers saving children from fires and floods.

They’ve steered clear of monsters.

If the Doctor does study his history before flying into it, then he’s doing it for a lot more than just _impressing_ anyone. He’s always had his reasons, but now they don’t include Clara. Missy and her hotel means Clara still gets to see Danny Pink, yet she’s lost the one thing that made her feel like the universe’s one and only: being the Doctor’s reason.

“See all this?” he’s saying now. “They only touch when they _mean_ to be engaging, whether it be in reproduction, companionship, or… eating.”

Clara tries to look around for examples of what he’s describing, tries to banish from her head the images of everything plant-like she knows. This is Plant Planet, and the rules she learned as a kid may only stand for a while.

“It’s the balance of an all-flora ecosystem. Too much of one thing, overpopulation. Too much of the other, famine.”

_Too much of the one in the middle,_ Clara thinks. _Loneliness for those without._

What is the opposite of overpopulation?

“Do you think it’s hard to live in that balance? To find it?” Missy asks, her voice casual.

It’s then that Clara looks down to find what is probably the least noticeable growth in the whole planet. Shielded by a taller bush, almost a small tree in size with an ivy by its trunk. A three-piece little plant of various shades of the same colors. It takes a second look, a good look, to notice it’s _three_ and not one. With just one look, she might have thought it part of the bigger plant’s entourage.

“I think it’s hard to achieve any sort of balance,” the Doctor is saying. “That’s why it’s so nice to find it in natural conditions.”

Balance, yes. This three-piece little thing is _balanced._ Clara would say so. Even in passing, as she walks now, and the echo of it burns her eyes with bright green in the afterimage.

Two equally tall flowers, of equally robust stems. Their shape growing strong and upwards in an angle so slight that Clara doesn’t know it (Danny might have, if the Doctor had ever let him come along); although almost perfect mirrors of each other, these two flowers bloom their different ways. A tiny petal here and there that doesn’t match. A breeze, moving one the opposite way. Together, but individual.

And then, between them, a tiny ugly growth. Barely round enough, barely green enough to be called a growth and not a stone placed in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

Clara scoffs to herself, then it hits her.

_That’s me. I’m the ugly growth between two flowers._

“But how can this habitat so much as _exist_?” Missy asks. She’s still teasing. She knows the answers as much as the Doctor does. She must. It’s the game she enjoys. “There is no such thing as perfect balance. And no such thing as a perfect environment to grow in.”

“Well, you make it,” the Doctor says. “Sometimes that’s successful enough. Every living thing is smart enough to fight for its own survival. Especially if it depends on the survival of other living things.”

Instead of lingering on the place and the thought that germinated it, the three of them move on. Perhaps one of the perks of existing in a surface that is like the opposite of a garden dome is the scent. Below, the petrichor. Around, perfumes betwixt perfumes. Above, the freshness of partial shadows.

Clara can’t figure out what this pacing around, seeing plants, will bring them. If it’s peace, the skin on her hands is getting all the scalier from twitching them so often, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She can’t even figure out _when_ the first shoe dropped in the first place. Or what the shoe itself stands for.

She just breathes in an air that weirdly smells as intense as perfume shops, and pretends not to care about everything else. Even the most beautiful of flowers cease to be so when she’s pretending to like them.

At some point, she realizes she just sees _objects,_ occupying a space she traverses. They’re literally just walking. Across a planet where nothing happens. Where nothing could ever happen.

When did the magic die?

When exactly did the Clara who preferred alien boredom to normal boredom evolve into this Clara, who right now doesn’t know what she prefers?

‘When’ is not the right word.

“Oh,” Missy says later. It’s probably the only sound that has come out of any of them in a while.

That’s the problem with rhythmical, with the music of a breeze here and there, trees and leaves rustling to lull you into thinking it’s been definitely not as long as you think.

As if they’d been walking in synchrony up to here, the three travelers stop by a medium-sized tree trunk.

“Is it me or is that very much _not_ wood?” Missy says.

“It looks as if someone had…” Clara begins. For a moment, for a single beautiful moment, nothing exists in her head except for what she’s seeing. _This,_ a voice reminds her, _this is why you do it._ That moment is her reason. “Vomited acid onto it.”

The Doctor takes no time to lean forward, as _forward_ as he can without snapping his back, and inspect it.

“Curiously enough, that’s not a hole in the bark. Hmmm…”

And then, even more curiously for Clara, who has seen him sit by rocks because he thought they were off by a few nanometers and had to figure out why before they left the planet, the Doctor dusts off his pants and gets up as if there was nothing to see there.

“Probably some side effect of the soil-to-sun synergy,” he says. “Definitely not wood. Pretty, though.”

He and Missy take one final, dismissive look at what now Clara has classified as _almost glass_ in her head, and keep pacing on. She has long since lost track of where they’re going, or why. Maybe they _are_ hunting for adventures.

She stares at the hole in the trunk that is not a hole. It does look like glass, glass that’s grown as part of the trunk. Glass, not wood. She passes one hesitant finger over it. All the more curious, indeed. The glass is soft under her fingertips, the bark is rough, but the points of union between both textures… There are no imperfections there. Rough and soft form a gradient of bark and glass, so subtly she has to pass her hand a couple of times.

The inside workings of the tree, in intricate and perfect patterns, are made visible because of it. She wonders for a moment if the glass affects it in any way. Then, because she knows she’s fallen behind, and because the moment has passed, Clara just gets up, dusts the leaves off her skirt, and follows the couple into the depths of the forest.

“Imagine if some hunky creature leapt from the shadows now,” Missy is saying.

From time to time, her hand finds the Doctor’s.

“There are no other life forms here,” he reminds her softly. Because he knows she’s kidding, Clara tells herself. That is the voice he uses when teasing gets old and he wants something else. But what? “Leaf eats leaf. Soil eats leaf. Leaf grows in soil.”

“Your grasp of botany astounds me,” Missy says. “If nothing _interesting_ ’s going to happen, then why do you take us girls here?”

“Because there’s got to be a clearing somewhere. And we can see the sun better from there.” He turns his head back in a maneuver that should hurt his neck and never does. “You like that, don’t you, Clara? The sun? Some sun? Looking a bit pale there!”

She waves her hand around dismissively.

“It’s the light.”

“Remind me to get you shopping sometime, honey,” Missy says to her, too. Clara has never liked the sweetness in her voice, that sweetness Missy approached her with since the very first day, after they met and she swooped the Doctor away. She didn’t use that tone that first day at the hotel. “You _so_ could do with red lipstick. Would work wonders on your skin tone.”

Clara refrains to say that her paleness is fine. That Missy’s own face is pretty milky as well and that, as matter of fact, using red lipstick only makes it look whiter. But she knows it’s just… everything piling, and not her own thoughts.

She knows she’s just resenting the change.

Like the first time.

Only now… no one has regenerated.

“If anyone has better ideas than the sun thing, I’m all ears. But quiet days can be happy sometimes, too,” the Doctor says. “You deserve quiet days with me, I know I fail to provide them most of the time.”

“I’d believe that if I knew you were capable of sitting still.”

“There’s beauty in stillness, there’s beauty in calm, in moments pressed together like this—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Missy leans in towards the Doctor’s ear. “How far along do you think you would have already raced forward, were my hand not nicely tucked in your own?”

Through the trees, in a horizon that can never be reached, probably, he’d be standing there like Peter Pan with his proudly sculpted dagger. And the sun would hit him ever so nicely. A white sun, not yellow.

“Ohohoho, as if you wouldn’t be racing down the tree line with me, Missy.”

Eventually, Clara just tunes them out.

The foliage seems to be clearing a bit around them, and by the time they reach parts of the eternal forest with patches of visible ground, Clara’s used to the constant humming of nature being interrupted by conversation.

“There!” she says.

In the end, she’s the one to run.

It’s easy to spot in the sun. Fractals of light make it brighter than anything else, pointing all eyes to it. Calling attention, whether attention wants to be called or not. Glass, not entirely transparent yet, letting little veins of green through.

The footsteps of the Doctor and Missy follow. Soft against softer terrain, fast in their hurry.

“What? What is it? What did you see?” he says, looking all around. Up and down, sideways. The entire world is his to observe and he doesn’t have enough _senses_ to feel it all in one second.

Missy takes their interlaced hands to point at what Clara’s standing by.

An entire plant, translucid. Each fabric of it made to be a substance that is not vegetable anymore and yet that is still recognizable as such. The inner workings of the plant remain normal, it’s only the outside that’s glass.

The clearing the Doctor was meaning to get them to is no more than a few steps away, somewhat concealed in branches that twirl and sway in the breeze. He’s not looking for that now.

“Okay,” he says. His eyebrows are beginning to very slowly retract from their original, calm position into a uniform sideways arch. “O…kay.”

Missy laughs. “Glass plant.”

“Glass _plants_ , plural.”

“Think there’s a connection?” Clara says, crossing her arms.

The Doctor turns several times. First, to Clara. Then, to Missy. Next, back to look at the small creation.

“How far away do you think the two samples are?” he asks.

“Don’t know,” Clara says.

“Not very far,” Missy says.

“This is Plant Planet,” he says slowly. “One exception to a rule is fine. Odd species happen. Hybrids, interbreeding… You know the drill. Eventually, the exception _becomes_ the rule.” He motions with his hands, creating two superseding waves as he speaks. “And that’s how you get subspecies. But a plant made of glass that wasn’t always glass?”

“This one could have been,” Missy points out. “It’s the other one that only had the one patch.” She regards him for a moment, then grins. “You wanna take samples, don’t you?”

He lets out a long breath.

“Desperately.”

“So let’s go,” Missy says. “Beats _sun_ bathing. I’m certainly not a plant.”

He begins to walk away, then stops, as if he’d remembered something, and promptly turns back, to Clara. He gets his screwdriver out of a pocket and gives it to her.

“Sample-taking,” he says. “Fun, eh?”

“Beats sunbathing,” she just parrots.

Right in front of her, Missy closes her parasol and holds it as if it were a rifle. She winks at Clara.

“What am I looking for?” Clara asks him.

“Changes in the basic molecular blueprint,” the Doctor says, pressing some button in his screwdriver. “It’s in there for easy side-by-side comparison. There’ll be a bleep if there’s no match, too. Or a beep. Not sure.” He frowns. “I think the light is supposed to go green.”

“Right,” Clara nods. “Compare. Noise. Light. Got it. Now go bleep plants with a parasol.”

The Doctor doesn’t even come up with a witty reply, he practically saunters over to Missy and squeals with her over strange results on her sonic parasol. Whatever they see on it, it makes sense for them.

More than the scant information Clara is getting on the screwdriver, anyway, from the few plants around her. She scans the glass plant first, just to check. And goes on around it, trying one by one everything big enough to register.

Nothing. All comes back normal. Perfectly within whatever is _normal_ for an alien planet and its plants.

She strays a bit from the area of the clearing, just enough that she can no longer distinguish whatever is being said by Missy and the Doctor, and finds a little stream of water. It’s thicker than the one on Earth, which puts her off at first, as well as the greenish color of it, but the trickle of it is unmistakable.

Even so, just in case, Clara sonics it.

The screwdriver does indeed bleep, and the light does come back green.

She stares at it in confusion and tries again, this time crouching to make sure she _is_ pointing at the water and not a nearby plant. There are no glass plants around it. She wants to be sure of this.

Another bleep. Another green light.

Clara’s lip curve up, her heart beats fast and lively inside her chest, and she has never jumped to her feet like this to head anywhere.

As she sprints closer, she hears them again. Their voices guide her through the apparent quiet background of everything else.

“…mmm, no. I’m _positively_ sure.”

The Doctor gives out a short laugh. “You can’t be positively sure. You don’t know.”

The whirr of Missy’s sonic parasol fills the space between words.

“It’s going to be drainage from a substance, something from _here_. Not alien. Why would it be alien?”

“I have a tendency to run into alien invasions, incursions and other problematics starting with the letter ‘I’, so… it could be alien.” The Doctor lifts up a finger. “Never rule out alien.”

“Homegrown, Doctor. Whatever it is, it’s right before our very eyes and we cannot see it.”

Clara pants once she’s found them, holding the Doctor’s screwdriver in her hands like a magic wand. She holds it tight, afraid the sweat will have it slip past her grip.

Neither of them so much as look up to acknowledge they’ve seen her come back.

“Alright. For a minute, I will grant you the privilege of assuming you’re right,” the Doctor says. “How and why would any plant absorb another substance into itself?”

“I’m just theorizing here but… well, some are still clearly transitioning. Some already have. And some have the genetic makeup for it but haven’t. Which leads me to believe that it’s something that affects them from germination, I’m just unsure… of what… it could be.” Missy paces around, hand musing her chin as if she had a shadow of a beard. Maybe in another life she did.

“Um…” Clara tries.

She thought herself invisible before. Now, even inches away, they cannot see. She could be screaming her lungs out, they wouldn’t notice her there.

The mystery, the thrill of solving it together, even if it’s just some tiny thing about plants and water and glass, is everything to them. She really is the growth that anyone could mistake for a stone.

“Ha!” The Doctor says. “Another one.”

“I wonder what it is that does this… And if it hurts them. Does it kill them, do you think?”

“Nah,” he says. “Do you see the sap flowing? Like little veins? Still very much alive.”

They both really are right there, not even fundamentally far away, and all they can see is each other. They lean towards another sample they’ve checked, to witness the beauty of glass and life, all existing at the same time. And the answer they’re looking for might as well be written in tiny letters a thousand worlds away, it’s the same to them.

Their shoulders bump, and Missy looks at him when he’s not paying attention. Missy really does look at him, admiring the mind behind the silliness, aware that it’s there even though he isn’t very keen on showing it these days, nobody knows why.

Clara should be in the hotel right now, and she should be on Danny’s bed talking about their kids. He can’t see them anymore and he misses them, so she comes up to his room, yells amiably at his roommate until they’re left alone, and tells them all about the school and that bloody mad uptight new math teacher.

Danny always smiles when Clara says those things. He makes his own jokes, and she tries very very hard not to remember that the hotel room is all there is for her now.

In this eternal forest, this Plant Planet that sounds more like a joke than her school’s new math teacher, Clara wishes more than anything to go home. To go to Missy’s hotel and yell at Danny’s roommate until they’re alone in there and she can let it all out. All about the Doctor. Danny would understand, Danny likes to call him names, Danny would tell her it’s exactly like the last time.

Maybe, she thinks now, she should just go wait in the TARDIS and ask the Doctor to take her there when they come back, much later.

Sighing, she leaves him and Missy to their bickering about theories that make sense but don’t, and goes sit down on a mossy boulder.

That is why she is witness to it. To the exact split second.

She has traveled in time long enough, hung around the Doctor paying enough attention. Split seconds are how mysteries get solved, how wars end before they began. It’s the split second that tells you what you need to know to put eternity into perspective.

“Psssst!”

No more coy flirting. No more happy-go-lucky looking at plants together. Raw, quick whispers this time. And every hiss of air is what’s been making Clara’s hairs stand all day long, preemptively.

“Where’s Clara?” Missy says.

“What’d you mean, where’s Clara? She was right here—” The Doctor turns around three times in the same go. “Oh. She isn’t here.”

“ _Big news._ ”

“Shut up. We need to find her. We can’t lose _Clara._ ” He urghs much more loudly than he would have if he’d noticed Clara not very far away, listening in, paying attention. “ _I…_ don’t have the time… for _this_!”

Split second after split second. A moment builds, thus. A moment grows.

“Look, let’s split up,” Missy says quickly. One thing Clara will say about her, she’s of quicker thinking than the Doctor in matters of his personal business. “I’ll sonic you if I find her.”

“AH!” he says. “She’s still got my screwdriver. Sonic it now. I’ll follow the signal.”

Immediately, Clara leans in towards the grass and moss around her and pretends to be looking for clues. Because the sonic in her hand _will_ bleep, and then they will see. Now that they’re looking, they see.

The reason for that has her forehead humid and her knees somehow less stable than she thought they would be.

Still, it takes the duo a bit to trace her back to the boulder, and the instant they have spotted her, some steps away, their eyes meet and their stances loosen at once. Nothing like that could be anything but staged. The relief should have come earlier, when they’d known they _could_ find her.

“Found anything interesting?” the Doctor says to her.

If he’s so relieved, why isn’t he asking why she disappeared? Why she got lost, if she did? Why is he, why are _they,_ pretending like this?

So many whys, Clara’s got her own mystery to unravel this time.

“Couple of things,” Clara just says, looking up from the moss. “You?”

“Theoretically,” Missy says casually. “Meaning, there’s this theory that maybe whatever caused it is autochthonous, but aliens sounds better to some ears.”

“Answer me this, Clara,” the Doctor says, putting a hand to her shoulder. His body faces her directly this time, and his voice… whatever he’s meaning to do with it, it has not sounded like this all day. “You see a plant changing into something else, something you can sort of name but only because of resemblance? Isn’t it a logical reaction to point fingers at aliens? Eh?”

“Actually, I’m with Missy,” she says, handing him back his own screwdriver. “I found traces of the same substance in water—what I _assume_ is water. I couldn’t find any other collections of it, so maybe some plants drinking from that particular stream might have mutated to develop the glass, some didn’t?”

“That’s…” the Doctor says, looking at Clara’s data.

“The most brilliant thing ever to happen today. Girls got to stick together, eh?” Missy winks at her. “He wouldn’t believe me if I dunked the evidence on him.”

“Well, you didn’t really have it.”

“But now you do!” Missy says. “Now it’s official!” She dusts dirt she has not touched yet off her hands. “Let’s pack up, go home, call it a wrap! I win! Thank you, Clara Oswald, for the definitive proof!”

The Doctor gulps and time seems to stop for a heartbeat or two between him and Missy.

“We can’t leave now…” he says.

“Why not?” she says. Then, she opens her eyes wide and nods. “Ah, yes. The clearing. Sun. Good for skin.”

“If you don’t mind,” Clara says, a little louder than she intended, because otherwise she isn’t too sure they would hear once they have fallen back into their routine, “I’d rather we headed back. To the hotel. I want to see Danny before the weekend’s over, and I’ve got to grade papers tomorrow.”

“Uuuuuuh…” is all the Doctor can say to that.

He tries to find support—and words—in Missy, as he often does. But she comes up with nothing either, biting the red lipstick out of her mouth.

“What? Can’t we? Have you somehow _lost_ the TARDIS?”

It wouldn’t be the first time. And Clara would very much like to believe that’s exactly what’s happened. But she can’t, not after today. Two mighty Time Lords, used to riddles, used to last resorts, and they’re blanking on ‘take me back’?

“Doctor?” Clara adds, gritting her teeth.

“I’m sorry…” Missy mutters, but not to _her._ To him. Reaching out for his hand. Finding it, she leans against his shoulder.

“’S alright. It’s my fault.”

“Doctor!” Clara insists. She stands now to let her voice carry louder. “What the hell is going on here? What the hell aren’t you telling me?”

What hasn’t he been telling her? And for how long?

At least for this, and she doesn’t want to think if that’s a good or a bad sign, he looks her in the eye.

“Clara, sit down,” he says. “Please.”

“No. Whatever it is, you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me now, like this. Or I’ll run away until I find that TARDIS and so help me god, I’ll find a way to fly her.”

Just one breath. And the words come out.

Clara hears them disconnected from each other.

In a way, they have been there, hanging between Missy, her, and the Doctor. Tying them together since the very beginning.

It all depends on what she thinks is the beginning.

“Clara…” he says slowly. “Danny’s not at the hotel anymore.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” comes Missy’s voice. “But it had to happen sometime. It happens to them all.”

The Doctor makes a warning noise at her to get her to stop saying those words. Because, after all, he knows Clara, he hasn’t forgotten entirely that he knows her. And those words, right now, are worse than the words that came _before_ them _._

“Take me back,” Clara just utters.

She stands amidst the green. It could be gray for all she cares. Gray ashes in the wake of a volcano. Maybe she’s the lava, killing everything. Whatever’s rising up in her throat, in her eyes, is hot enough to.

“He’s not… he’s not _there_ anymore,” the Doctor says. He’s raised both hands towards her, like he’s approaching some wild animal in a National Geographic special where a scientist can finally meet their object of study. “Do you understand?”

“Take me back,” she says again. Her teeth are gritted so hard, they hurt. “I want to see for myself.”

“There’s nothing left of him,” Missy says quietly.

“You were not supposed to find out like this—”

“I was not supposed to find out at all, was I?” Clara says, laughing nervously. “Just keep the human in the dark until she forgets. Well, _sorry._ My life is short enough that I can remember every death in it, Doctor.”

“Listen to me.”

“No.”

“Clara, listen to me. He won’t be there anymore. I’m sorry this is how… I’m sorry. But—”

Missy puts a hand on the Doctor’s arm.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Let’s just take her.”

Clara had thought the walk across the messy green was long, but the walk back, in silence, without a single exchange between them, is much longer.

She tries to hold it in. The fire.

Yet every time she pushes it down, there it is. Danny’s face, a little blurrier in her mind, because now she knows her memory of it is the only chance she has at seeing it again.

When they reach the TARDIS, the sun is setting, and neither of them can get in fast enough. At this point, Clara’s tears are pure flame, and she’s grinding her teeth to keep the sobs at bay. She will not let them have the satisfaction, these Time Lords who think everybody is like them.

Missy moves the coats off the chair, and Clara barely waits until she has to sit down there.

“Are you sure about this?” Missy asks. “We could go anywhere else first. See the stars. Any star. It might make you feel better before you have to come back and face it all.”

“What will make me feel better is for you to—” She swallows her words. The final verb that has been waiting to be spoken for a long time.

“He’s been dead since that day,” Missy just says. “I told you he was. It’s never in anyone’s interest to forget that.”

“You shouldn’t have saved him, then. If they’re dead anyway, why save them?”

“I’m not the one that’s in love with one of them, dear…”

Missy moves away towards the console, where the Doctor’s hands are trembling.

“I don’t know how to do this…” the Doctor mutters.

And even if he means to say it privately to Missy, the TARDIS’s main console room is small enough for the sound to carry.

“Take off,” Clara says. “Have this bloody ship take off or I will. I’m so tired of your decisions. Didn’t you want me to make my own? Well, this is mine. This is the one decision you don’t get to make or meddle in for me. Is that clear?”

Slowly, the Doctor looks up at her and holds her gaze longer than she was prepared for. Even as he readies the TARDIS for takeoff, he gazes into her eyes, and she thought she knew most about the lonely traveler in his blue box. The shadows dancing in those eyes scare her almost as much as the rage going on inside her.

When they land, thudding against grass, Clara doesn’t wait for words or permission. She’s out the door breathing hard and fast. To get to Danny’s room. To really see. Because she has ridden in the blue box long enough.

What things appear to be and what they are is not always the same. Death has been cheated before her eyes. Time and time again, the things she’s seen… And Danny, something real and solid, something from the life she thought she didn’t want… they took that from her? Twice?

She dashes over the red carpet. On the second day, she learned to follow it all the way. The Doctor got lost, she didn’t.

Now, he yells at her to stop and wait.

“Clara, please!”

For a moment, in his voice there’s the echo of the younger him she once thought she might grow to love more than what she had built over time on Earth.

Funny thing, love.

You get it, you lose it. It changes in you. It changes outside you. It changes you _._

And still it always leaves you.

Danny Pink cannot be dead. Because if he’s really dead this time, if he’s gone from all versions of reality, all Clara has is fake Wednesdays and grading papers.

She turns the corner to his corridor. She has to turn it twice or the right door won’t appear in this spot. It’s a trick he taught her the first month, a trick she never told the Doctor so he’d always take longer to show.

When the door reveals itself, she runs to it, hands slamming on wood. She barely remembers to turn the handle.

And then—

Then she wishes she hadn’t.

She wishes she hadn’t come down for groceries and had lived on bread and cheese for the week.

Two beds. One empty. The _left_ one’s empty.

She sits on it and grabs the pillow anyway, to then bury her face in it. It smells like old cardigans and that softener Danny used on his clothes. It smells like past tense and blames to carry.

“Clara…”

The Doctor walks in first after some time. She’d like to say that his face is the right shade of apologetic, that he looks like he’s about to sit down with her and say everything he hasn’t, but he just stands here, so… alien. She never realized how other-worldly he looks.

Missy just stands by the door, a foreigner to what own creation.

“This is much, much worse than when he was gone back home,” Clara tells him.

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I didn’t want you to come back. All his things… they’re in the TARDIS. They’re yours now. But here? This is just a black hole for you right now.”

“This place _is_ a black hole. It’s all just memories,” Missy says, almost in a mumble. “They all go away in the end, somewhere where nothing else can reach.”

But that’s _death._ Outside the hotel, that’s still _death._ It simply happens once. Without some transitional period that makes it feel like Life 2.0., because it’s not.

“Let me take you home, eh? We’ll figure something out.” He keeps talking. Word after word of empty promises. What is there to figure out? If death can be cheated once, it cannot be cheated twice. “We always do, don’t we?

“Doctor…” Missy says, warningly.

He recoils into her, into the door where she awaits. And if there was ever a time, a moment, for Clara to soften into his arms and say yes to home, to traveling back and accepting a second death as part of a normal life, this is where it crashes and burns.

“Let her mourn this her way. This is unprecedented. They come here to learn peace, to forgive themselves,” Missy whispers to the Doctor, and Clara doesn’t listen to the words, she just hears the two of them talking when she’s sitting on late Danny Pink’s bed, alone, on the brink of so many things that sitting is all the options she has. “No one _living_ has ever had to deal with their loss twice.”

Clara has lost her last tether and there he is, back to Missy. What has Missy lost?

Maybe Clara _will_ force Missy to lose something precious to her, and thus have him lose something in his turn. So they will understand.

She forgets, in her rage, that they do. And that is their problem. In understanding, they know that they can’t really help her, and their failure is that they do not even try.

When the Doctor enters the room back again, ready to try in his own way, it does not matter. Clara’s tears have dried around her eyes, tensing and reddening the skin. He sits with her on the bed, and leans his head on her shoulder, putting an arm around her.

He even closes his eyes, the old idiot.

Clara almost suffers for him. It’s so, so easy to slip her hand past and into his pocket without him noticing.

“Home?” the Doctor asks quietly, after.

She sniffles tears she has already shed and nods.

“Home.”

They walk slowly back to the TARDIS. She lets them squabble like nothing had happened, and just drags her feet along. It’s what she wants. Let them, let them forget. The second the blue doors close behind the Doctor and Missy, they’re so enraptured in their conversation about whatever it is now, that they can’t even realize Clara has willingly stayed behind this time.

She waits by the magnificent box until she can see it alternate between here and not here, whirring the most beautiful sounds in the universe. Then, she gets the stolen screwdriver out of her pocket and runs.

It’s a matter of time, after all. But a little of it is all she needs.

* * *

They find her on her knees.

All around, what used to be green is nothing but ashes falling and charred hills. The pillars and columns of the hotel burn in bursts of small flames; any remnant of carpet, wallpaper and furniture was consumed in an explosion that puts Clara, broken, crying and sobbing on an ashen bed, at its very center.

There are no bodies, but of course, there wouldn’t be.

The eerily quiet breeze scattering the remains of the Hotel of the Dead is only ever shattered by Missy’s wounded cry. It’s impossible for the Doctor to draw breath, to so much as take a step either towards Clara or to face Missy.

His TARDIS landed outside of the explosion where there’s still green; Missy’s remains untouched at the heart of it. It’s the only thing that has survived it.

He half-expects her to rise from the tears and say what she would have, in different times. Back up a few decades, and the Master would have blown Clara sky-high for this.

“Get her,” Missy just mutters through her teeth. “Get her and let’s _go._ ”

Trembling, he does as he’s told. Through the debris, past the broken vase of the eternal flame that now burns no more, next to what used to be the Matrix of the hotel.

He kneels by Clara’s side.

“Can you feel it, Doctor, like I do?” she asks him, piercing his eyes with her own. It’s the closest he’s ever been to a rage as consuming as his own. “Will you do anything to stop it now?”

His only answer to that is to put an arm around her and help her up, towards his own TARDIS, where Missy still waits, staring at the destruction that should have never been.

“I’ll come back for you,” he tells Missy in a soft mutter. “Don’t travel alone.”

Missy glances at him like she was honestly wondering if he thought she had anywhere left to go. If she would do anything but stay here, even if _here_ was nothing but the aftermath of death.

She glances at him and he knows she’ll wait. He forgot for a moment that _Missy_ waits _._

But Clara… He pushes her gently inside the TARDIS, stares at her across the console, like he used to. Except nothing is the same anymore.

Clara has changed more than he ever did after any regeneration. And she has not talked to him about it. Not for one second.

They’ve been severed by this. Can he let it? Does he know how to not let it? She blew up the only thing that kept Missy stable, the only thing that reconnected them. She severed _them,_ too.

_Why?_ he asks himself over and over. _What have I been too busy to see?_ _What have I walked past all this time?_

For the first time in a long time, the TARDIS lands and the only noise is hers, braking as she gets them home.

“I really thought you were different,” Clara says when there’s just the hum of engines cooling down. “I really thought you _saw_ more, just chose to keep it private. But you only see what you want to. I realize that now.”

“That’s why you’re here,” he tells her softly. “To help me see what I can’t.”

“Except I’m not. I was here to keep you company. And now you don’t need me, not even for that.” Clara laughs. And it rasps like nails against the inner metal walls of the TARDIS. It makes him wish he’d treasured more each one of her giggles. “I have finally seen that, as much as you say you care about humans, your life revolves around immortality and your immortal friends a lot more than you’ll ever care to admit. And it’s time you did admit it. At least to yourself, if you’re not ready to admit it to the humans you so profess to love. Because those humans are cleverer than you. And we will always pick up on it in the end.”

She opens the door, and turns to face him one last time. She looks at him with the last ounce of grace she can, with the last bit of good memories she can muster.

“Goodbye, Doctor.”

He stands in the console room for a while, in the silence of a hum. Twice in a few lifetimes, he has put the Master before humans. And humans have suffered for it.

Only this time there is no magical time traveling trick he can perform to get them out of the trouble he accidentally got them in.

_Wilfred Mott…_ he thinks. _Why does it all still come back to you? Why can’t you just… have all my answers?_


	3. Red in the water

_Back then, she would have teamed up with anything. The darkest species in the universe. She did. Their only intent was to negotiate in circles until resistance was met and they could finally shoot to kill. And she’d loved the sounds of death at their mercy._

_A world of chaos, being thrust upon the world that had raised her. What a wonderful day, the one when she’d watched a small city burn from the skies._

_The fire tore upwards in ardent branches that swallowed the noise of the wounded and shone even through the ash rain. Smoke spiraled into gray columns everywhere, so slow, so thick. She had never seen anything more breath-taking. Literally. Anybody in it would choke to death, if the Daleks didn’t get to them first._

_She was watching the first fallen city of the Time War, safe and sound in a saucer. And her one and only reaction was… to cackle._

_Gallifrey, falling._

_What a truly wonderful day, indeed._

* * *

A TARDIS and cinders.

How easily everything turns into colors that before were nowhere to be seen. Her garden was all green and marble, now it’s an inferno, a volcano come to firm solid ground to turn it asunder. Trenches of roots have been dug up, yellow sparks still smoldering in their dark surface. And the house…

There is no longer a house to speak of.

Columns stand in torn pieces, severed in fifths and sixths like monuments of times too young to count. No Roman lived and fell here. No deity was praised. Just ordinary lives that deserved a chance and now will never get it.

The soles of Missy’s feet disturb what remains of the wood and carpet that used to be the hotel’s floors. If she’s not careful, her heels find the crevices and slip into the ground, making her lose her balance. There is nowhere to hold on to if that happens.

Her beautiful machine, the only thing that allowed this place to breathe life again, is crisp and coals like everything else. The mother, the mind, dead on the floor that is now ground. The matrix, expired like any old telephone past its last useful day, just strewn over the ground. Missy can hear the whispers in agony of those trapped inside it, forever condemned to a deadly silence that never ends.

She can hear, too, the circuit of a materialization not far behind her. How many lives has she lived in which that sound overrode everything else? Today, whispers are louder.

Two TARDISes… and cinders in the wind.

Footsteps on the soil that come closer until she knows she’s not alone anymore. She supposes this is the wake of the people lost. Those already dead and those she could have saved in the future from dying once.

“This is all I had left of them,” Missy says meekly.

It’s the wake of people lost longer ago, when time itself wasn’t the thread but the spinning wheel.

“That’s not true,” says the Doctor. His hand comes to rest on her shoulder, never too heavy, never patronizing. “You’ve got me.”

Missy remembers another conversation. Several others. The Doctor and his insistence, upon finding out that his Master had survived, that the last of the Time Lords wasn’t just him anymore. That he didn’t have to bear that title alone.

He’d done more than insist on that new reality. He’d offered it to her. Over and over again, as a gift she wouldn’t have known how to accept, then.

_We’re the only two left,_ he’d said. She had only known how to die in his arms, refusing to spend the rest of her life as his prisoner as well as her own. Maybe, that one time, the Doctor’s words hadn’t been an offer but a _plea._ A rare, desperate thing.

“Your daft old antique,” the Doctor continues softly, squeezing her shoulder. “I can be that. All the memory you’ll ever need, I promise.”

She turns a little to face him.

“Am I?” Her voice trembles. “Am I all the memory you ever needed of home?”

After all, it goes both ways.

“You’re all the memory I want of home,” he says instead. “Everything else… is too far gone, scattered in too many directions now.”

Families, descendants, friends, trapped inside a bubble. Safe and trapped. Just because they didn’t die in war that doesn’t mean they’re not living one. It’s always war, isn’t it? For the Doctor and the Master that lived the times of old, it’s always this that brings them back home to see everything they once loved destroyed.

And yet, even here, so far away from that, war comes to them. In smaller fractions, in pain that lasts minutes but doesn’t hurt any less because of it.

He drops his hand to her side and bumps his pinky finger against hers.

Sometimes, when he touches her, it’s not a game.

They stand in front of the Matrix for a long time, just watching, breathing as it cannot anymore. Both have lost ties to parts of themselves today, to icons that tied them together as well. The sole act of facing that, one on one, instead of running away to pretend they do not see it, is incredibly debilitating. But they were bred to withstand.

After a while, Missy breaks out of it first. She wears mascara and knows the worth of shed tears that ruin it. She begins to haul what is left of her physical, tangible earth-like Matrix into her own TARDIS, camouflaged as a door standing in the middle of the emptiness. The Doctor runs to her side and helps her carry the weight.

“You don’t have to,” she says.

“No, but I am,” he says. “Just accept that. Just this one time. Missy…”

“You don’t have to help me rebuild something that’s this _mine_ —or be here every bloody step of the way—just because you feel that somehow you’re the reason it all existed in the first place _._ ”

She drops the weight of the machine against the floor. The noise echoes off every surface and tunnel that delves into the many hearts of the TARDIS. Then, she exhales deeply, leaning against the wall.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m still an asshole to you sometimes, aren’t I?”

“Well,” the Doctor says, standing by the door, his hands in his pockets. She wonders if he’s ever walked into anybody else’s TARDIS in the past, recently enough to know that is how it makes you act, like you’re intruding if you take too many steps in. “I’m an asshole to you, too. I thought it was part of our thing.”

“You know I don’t mean that. The bickering’s fine. I mean… lashing out when you’re being _good._ ” She looks up at him. “ _Because_ you’re being good.”

“That’s part of it, I think,” the Doctor says quietly, thoughtfully. “‘Good’ is just admitting to that and working towards dismantling it before it acts out of you, before you act on it. ‘Good’ isn’t not feeling like lashing out; definitely, it isn’t.”

He smiles her way, and at long last crosses the threshold to her.

His eyes, wrinkly and beautiful, say what he’s always said with everything but words. _It never mattered to me how good you were, Missy. Maybe it should have. I wanted it to, but it didn’t._ His words have always toyed with the limits of that idea, that statement she knows only by proxy. _I never gave up on you._ Which was, ultimately, what had made her lash out more. Because how could she deserve the love of her greatest enemy, her oldest friend who should have hated her the most for what she’d done?

_I forgive you,_ the Doctor had said, moments before her death. The Doctor had always forgiven her. And she’d always loved him and hated him fiercely for it.

“‘Good’ is just trying to be good, acknowledging when you’ve fallen short, and doing your best not to next time.”

“Nothing’s that black and white,” Missy says. After so much time spent in loneliness, thinking in silence about the specificities of morality, she knows that much. “Terrible people might think they’re doing the right thing, too, when they inflict their terror onto the world.”

Not her. All that time, she made it rain chaos because she enjoyed foreign suffering, not because she thought it was right to wreak it. And now she dreams of it every night. Now, the chaos soaks her bones and the suffering is hers to try and shield herself from, to no avail.

“Regardless of what you once were,” the Doctor says, “you’re not terrible now for having a reaction and apologizing.” He inhales. “In fact, I will go ahead and say that even bearing in mind what you once did, you are not terrible. Because you’ve changed. You, yourself, have decided to change for the better. That’s more good than terrible, don’t you think? In the spectrum of good-terrible?”

Missy sighs and nods succinctly.

His validation dissipates some of the doubts inside her. But that doesn’t mean the work is over. And that doesn’t mean the images of a burning city—the city she helped burn—disappear. They’re still there when she closes her eyes. And she can still feel it, the thrill of war and laughter. Right there, in her stomach. As young and lively as the day she first felt it, drumming against her like the noise inside her head.

She stares down at the broken Matrix.

“I can’t ever rebuild this again, can I?” she asks him.

He tries to find solvable parts to the problem. He always does. Solutions lie everywhere, just waiting to be found. But sometimes there’s just messes that cannot be untangled, and he just has to face them and the person asking him to untangle them.

“You could always build a new one,” he says, trying to sound hopeful.

“But then every mind in it dies. The final death…”

The Doctor breathes out softly, amused just a tad.

“I think… you’ve forgotten that they entered the hotel dead to leave it deader. The peace you gave them was a reprieve. A kindness. But they were already dead.”

“It’s a Time Lord matrix, you idiot. The mind _remains_ even if the body is gone. But kill the matrix and…” The final death. The most final death. “Now all I can even _do_ for them is take their belongings, or whatever’s left of them anyway, to their families,”

The Doctor’s face hardens.

“People move on, Missy, you can’t take that away from them.”

“Give it back to them when they still needed it, then,” she says. “We have two TARDISes, we’d finish faster.”

He shakes his head slowly, then lets it hang forward in an exhaustion that is not physical. Death puts so much into perspective, so much that he forgets until it stares him in the face and changes the person who leaps in time into the person who loses everything to time.

“Some things, like grief... are better left untampered with,” the Doctor says, still not looking up.

Missy understands the unsaid words in his body language. _Some things_. Like Clara and where he went wrong with her, pushing her to push him away.

“You didn’t make her do this, you know? She saw something she didn’t like and let it ruin her.”

Now, overtaken by a bit of rage and a bit of grief, he does look up to meet Missy’s changing eyes.

“Yes, but I could have been kinder to her. I can always be kinder.” A few moments and his eyes, too, change. Rage to grief to memories. Regret. “I could have been kinder. To you. I could have been kinder to you.”

_We could have had so much time_ …

Then she walks up to him, breaching the lines and the rules. She takes his hands, softly, in hers. Both hands into both hands. The duality of the Time Lord is always such, it’s the language of two. She wants his attention, but she wants something more. She wants him to reach the peace of mind he preaches for others and denies to himself.

“You _were._ ” She says his name. She doesn’t, not often. But now she needs to. To remind him of the person beneath ‘Doctor’, the person who made and kept the promises. The person who loses and feels beneath the masks and the shields that word erects for and around him. “You were, and I never listened. Clara had your kindness all this time, she could have listened to it, too.”

“When you have as many secrets as you and I do,” he says after a while, “I doubt listening for the truth in surfacing kindness is easy.”

* * *

In the end, they let the memories of the dead rest where their ashes lay. All they can do for them now is ensure that no traveler will accidentally run into the ruins and mistakenly bring in the police, so they camouflage the area. The Doctor suggests using remnants of chameleon circuits he has never paid much attention to, and Missy rewires them so that the hardware will mimic its surroundings, with the software establishing a telepathic connection in a wide enough radius. Anybody human who happens upon the clearing where the hotel stood will only just see a normal field, and they will feel no desire to stop by and walk through it.

Once it’s done, they watch the last embers of the explosion extinguish themselves as night falls. The sky, at this hour, with the sun giving up little by little, and everything slowly becoming silhouettes rather than things, is a gradient of rainbow light until it simply fades into dark blue.

“I don’t want to stay here when the stars come out,” Missy says.

“So let’s go.” The Doctor takes her hand. Not a game, an answer to a question that isn’t being asked. It stopped being a game the second Danny Pink faded. “Where to?”

Missy chuckles softly once.

“Not like that,” she says. “Meet me. In the rooftop of that library, in that street I almost burned.”

“Ah…” he says. “Not so sure that’s a good idea, taking the TARDIS back there. Might get recognized and…”

Missy looks him in the eye. Her gaze is indelibly potent even in the growing darkness.

“I don’t want to be here, Doctor,” she just says.

She lets go of him first to walk into her own TARDIS. She looks back at him for a moment, and judging by the way she does, he could almost swear that she doesn’t mind much if he’s following, she’s going anyway. It’s a trip he’s invited to go on, not a trip he’s devised for his own purposes and company.

Missy will fly with him, on his adventures and his crazy stories, but she maintains a space that is just hers to keep. And she makes sure he feels like he can be a part of it, if an apart part.

Watching her dematerialize from the charred glass, he shakes his head. He knows he will follow her. They have been following each other for centuries, on and off and on again.

As he pulls down the right lever, he speaks aloud for himself the same words he did for her then, two lives ago:

“To the stars.”

The TARDIS seems to toll in response, happy to oblige.

Missy is already waiting for him under a sky brighter than he remembers anything being. She’s parked neatly on a corner of the roof, and she’s gotten out a literal couch so they have somewhere to be. She’s sat down on one of the arms and is holding a bunch of edibles, probably purchased below. The Doctor recognizes the packaging from that one shared bite they had here, ages ago.

“How’d you pay for that?” he says, closing the TARDIS door.

“Niceness goes a long way.”

“It certainly does…”

Missy giggles. “I also keep a stash of morphable money around. Just in case.”

She pats the cushion right next to her, right below her. He walks awkwardly to where she is and takes the piece of food she is offering him.

Her smile is almost machiavellic, just like the ones he remembers used to make his insides churn at differing speeds, never making sense to him until they softened a tad, softening him as well.

Missy uncrosses her legs, gets up and sits on the couch. He imagines he should as well, so he does. The food remains in his hands, now tucked in the line his thighs make when they touch.

“Do you come here often?” he asks her.

She takes a bite off her piece, chews and swallows.

“Sometimes,” she says. “They have clearer skies than on Earth. It helps me think.” She laughs. “Helps clear my head.”

“Clear it of what?”

Missy takes a long breath, then sighs it out exasperatedly, as if she was looking for the right words to express it to someone who already knows the feeling first-hand and isn’t aware of it.

“Well, all those things humans see but can’t possibly comprehend.” She wonders momentarily where he goes hide in order to think about those things and how they plague _him._ “I come here and think about them in a different light.”

“And how is that working out for you?” he asks.

Missy giggles again.

“Not so good.” She takes another bite. “No, not so good.”

“Yeah…” he says.

They keep quiet for a while, looking up. So many angles Earth can’t quite reach from their side of the Milky Way, although it is true their telescopes and cosmic maps do grant some sort of closure about them. Earth has mapped all the skies they can, back and forth, in every version of time and space.

This has been their shared fascination from the beginning, Missy’s and the Doctor’s. A patch of dark, pierced by tiny fractals of light, all infinitely bigger on the inside. Standing at any sort of distance away from them remains a privilege few can have access to like this. With the knowledge of what stars truly are up close, in the heart of machines and as the energy source of a powerful race. It makes it all the more worthwhile to witness them, free and wild, where they should be.

The Doctor points at some of them, rambles on about names and identity tags and human stories that Missy hasn’t had time yet to learn. She smiles at all of them. When they were growing up, there were stories in stars, too. She just thought the stories would be different when it was her turn to star in them.

They watch the night under the starriness for so long that whatever few lights remained out on the city, slowly they’re all dimmed to the same darkness as it reins above. It all is becoming so cold, so quiet, that the Doctor notices without meaning to every time that Missy’s breathing gets interrupted when she bites her lip, clasping both her hands between her knees to keep them a little warmer.

He takes off his own jacket without thinking twice about it.

“Here.” He wraps it gently around her shoulders, lingering for a moment before his touch fades away.

“Oh.” Missy’s hand holds the jacket in place, not because it might fall, but because of how surprising the gesture feels coming from him. “ _Doctor._ Aren’t you cold?”

He grins stupidly. “I once almost froze to death in my own TARDIS. My cold tolerance has changed quite a bit, since.”

“You most certainly did not used to be this chivalrous, growing up,” she says, only joking a little.

He may have flirted with anything that moved, but only because he _could,_ not because he meant business. The Doctor, the old Doctor, had learned flirting as one might learn socialization.

“I’ve been almost a dozen different people since, I can barely remember what I was like.”

“Well, I remember you. A boy like that is very difficult to forget, trust me. I’ve tried. Many, many times…” She sighs, her gaze moving down from the stars to him, his face so scarcely lit in the starlight. “Did you ever remember me, all these years?”

“Not a day has passed that I didn’t,” he answers honestly.

“Funny thing, time. Neither of us knew, then.”

“I still don’t!”

They both laugh.

“Seriously!” he insists.

“Didn’t we have it written all over our faces? That we’d run until we became ourselves?”

He looks at her too. His seriousness is real, soft. Missy is almost afraid to return it, when she knows they’re talking about a destiny neither wanted much to believe in, back then.

“You had it written nowhere.” He speaks her name. He calls it. The name no one else knows. Because no one else can know it. “You chose that path like you’re choosing this one.”

“And am I just as unforgettable? Am I still etched in time?”

“I etched you in mine.” His hand finds her knee and squeezes it with tender, well-practiced affection. “Is that enough for you, you old conqueror?”

She remembers the days in which she burned star after star, just wishing harder than anything for him to notice, to come and see, to land right in front of her and see her. But he never did, he was too busy fighting someone else, in some other corner of the universe he was watching over in glee. Now he sits across from her every day—more than every day—and he does a whole lot more than just see her.

_Maybe he did etch me in time. His time._ There is no greater honor for the Missy that grew up in the shadow of who would grow up to be the mightiest Time Lord. _To be a permanent event in his timestream._

But when did he do it? When did he decide she was worth it?

Was _the Master_ ever good enough? Did she have to evolve into Missy, savior of life and death, for the Doctor to think she’d been finally deemed worthy to pass all his tests?

“I just… wonder,” Missy says.

And deep down, anyway, she knows. He spoke the truth earlier. The Doctor might have walked ahead sometimes, leaving her in his shadow, but he did always remember to turn back. To go back for her. In some way or another, that’s a promise he’s never broken.

Now, he distractedly pats her hand—only ever a few inches away from where his own was on her knee—, looking at the sky and sighing.

“The wondering… It gets old. I promise,” he says. “You’re left with something much more lasting in its place.”

“And what is that?”

“Your own decisions. The consequences of what you do, leaving marks on the world. I assure you… the world doesn’t forget. Neither do you.”

That thought remains in the calmness between them. It, too, is a mark of a story, the Doctor’s. His history as a rebel who lived free of rules and became a runaway because of a war he’d ended through having killed.

In running, he had saved others and learned the in-betweens, the road that joins _here_ and _there,_ can carry as much nuance as everything else on the extremes.

Missy has had plenty of time to think, and she’s a little bit convinced that his fear of ever becoming a person who makes the wrong choices thinking them right is what made him the Doctor, the rebel, again.

She’s hoping for the spark that will give her a new name. Or a new meaning to the one she already chose. Fear, faith, failure, she wonders which one it will be for her. She trusts him and his history, and if he says it’s coming, then she just has to hold on tight and hope.

Pity it’s this cold out. Pity her eyelids are so heavy…

“I think we’d better head back…” she says after a long, long while. “All’s clear that should be clear.”

“Clearer, in my case,” he jokes, getting up and offering her his hand. Not that she needs it.

“It always is ‘just clearer’, isn’t it?”

“Too many thoughts, too little time.”

Instead of laughing along with him, Missy gets up, taking off his jacket and neatly holding it close to her chest.

“What’s wrong?” he says.

“Nothing. Just tired. Very, very tired. Long day.” She smiles at him anyway. “Sleep will fix me. Will be radiant as any sun on the morrow.”

He stares for a moment, remembering the hotel, burned down to a crisp. All this time, he has been dropping Missy off there, from their travels. It didn’t occur to him until now…

“Missy,” he says slowly. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

“I’ve got my TARDIS.” She knocks on one of its walls. “Sturdy old thing. Blue as yours. Little empty except for that couch, but it…” She nods. “Will do just fine.”

Because she tries to smile again, he doesn’t.

Instead, he gets the doors of his own TARDIS open.

“Pop in”, he says. “I’ve got rooms. And beds. Plenty to choose from. Bunkbeds, even. Not very popular, I must warn you.”

“No, they wouldn’t be, would they?”

But, giving back his jacket and picking up the packets of food (to later throw them away somewhere), Missy goes in anyway. She does love the hum of his TARDIS, a sound of love, rather than of simple machinery. Her own mostly just groans at her.

They stand in the dim light of the console room for barely a couple of seconds before the Doctor lifts a finger to himself and disappears into a door momentarily.

He returns with a pair of blankets that he places in her arms.

“It’s been a while since I had people over, sorry.”

“Do you sleep, Doctor?” Missy asks him.

She sleeps. After regenerating inside the bare walls of what would become her hotel, she took up the habit again. Before, as the Master, she’d live without sleep, because she had so much _time_ to use, so much to think about and so many things to do.

“No, not really. Not anymore,” The Doctor says. “A nap now and then. Otherwise Clara worries.” He gets mortally serious and clears his throat. “ _Worried._ ”

Missy is positive that at night, instead of sleeping, he just sits somewhere moderately soft and thinks, or runs away into the universe where no thought can ever catch up to him in time.

She’s used to doing that alone, because people like her are better off that way, but the Doctor has built so much of who he is on the basis of company, however fleeting.

And now he’s as alone as she’s ever been.

“It’s not your fault,” Missy reminds him.

“I know.” He nods. “They always leave, eventually. Just… They don’t usually leave me like this.”

Not even Martha, one of the few who chose to leave and was not, one way or the other, forced to.

“So, um, let me show you to the many available bedrooms,” he says, before the thought becomes a feeling and he has to deal with it. It is already late enough outside, he doesn’t want to experience midnight in his hearts as well.

They walk past a few, not because Missy as a guest is picky about a dented bed on a corner, but because the Doctor has played host so many times he feels remorse over which rooms are suitable and which aren’t.

In the end, he finds what he’s looking for, not too far down into the corridors. Small, without more than a copy of a Van Gogh on the wall and a desk opposite the double bed. He always liked this room, the yellows and the oranges of the wallpaper reminded him of home. He hopes Missy will like it, too.

Even the walls are a little curved, mimicking a dome.

_Or a bubble_.

He moves away from the door to let her in, waving with a hand to let her know it’s okay to enter.

“Right, so… this is it.”

But she stands by the door, as if glued to the floor.

How many years must he have traveled the worlds to have every single room in this TARDIS furnished? How many lives has he lived, even within a regeneration, that he has memories in them all in the shape of memorabilia?

“Cozy,” she just says. “Love the yellow.”

“Thought you might.”

She looks at him and realizes that, even though he’s moved away, he’s not _walking_ away either.

“Right,” she says. “Goodnight, then?”

She frames it as a question, he hears it as an answer.

“Night-night.” He turns away in the opposite direction in which they’ve come, to promptly head back in the right one to return to the console room. “And sweet dreams.”

She watches him leave until he’s turned the corner, then goes inside the room to sit on the bed. Her feet dangle from the height of the mattress.

“Yeah,” she mutters to herself. “Sweet, sweet dreams, alright.”

Making an effort, Missy takes off her shoes and lies down on the yellow sheets of the yellow room. Her body almost seems to breathe in deeply without her consent.

But she knows sleep will elude her in this foreign space that no one has ever inhabited. Sleep always does, until it takes her, plagues her with dreams she wishes she didn’t understand.

If she closes her eyes now—she does—, she can see it all perfectly clear in her mind. The destruction she caused, the chaos she will bring back into the world.

And it resuscitates the old pain in her hearts that nothing, no amount of war and death, was ever able to quench.

That pain belonged to someone else, some other body and some other self. It has no place in her life now.

Missy squeezes her eyes shut and breathes. Just breathes.

They’re dreams. Only ever just that. Gallifrey already fell, it will not fall again. It can’t. And she wasn’t even the one to wreck it until it did. She just dreams about the city she helped burn, that’s all. And the Daleks she aided in crossing their atmosphere. And the Time Lord she loves, crossing the desert alone to face them all and win.

She thinks about the Time War and, ironically, falls asleep. After all, the horrors she saw can’t be worse than the horrors her dreams show her, even if they are the same. Reliving can’t be worse than having had to live it.

The dream might be about to take her from stupor to chaos when she wakes up again to the sound of footsteps. Immediately, she sits up. Nowhere she’s ever slept there were supposed to be footsteps.

“Sorry,” the Doctor whispers from the open door. “Heading in now.”

She hasn’t undone her bun for the night, and now stray hairs bob around her head as she looks at him in the dimness.

“Come here,” she tells him.

“What?”

“Here. Come.”

He chuckles nervously.

“No. No, no, no.”

“Oh, come on. Have you so easily forgotten?” Missy cocks her head. “Neither of us could sleep without the other in that awful barn. We’ve slept like this often enough. Nothing new.” She eyes him carefully. “You might even catch a wink and everything, the second your mind remembers what it was like in the past. Fall into the trap, Doctor. Let your body fall, too. And sleep. Even _you_ should.”

The fact that this is a whispered conversation doesn’t make it any easier for the Doctor’s head to process it in real time. Remember? Of course he remembers. But it’s been close to two thousand years. He hasn’t shared a sleeping space with _anyone_ in that time. He doesn’t really think he’s _had_ a sleeping space since he was that little, things have happened that kept him from it.

“Do you just want to use me as a body pillow? Be honest,” he asks, eyebrow arching. “Because I _have_ body pillows. I don’t remember who I got them for. Probably Amy… Or Donna. Can’t remember.”

“ _Doctor_.”

“What?”

“When was the last time you slept for more than fifteen minutes?” she asks him, serious. “Be honest.”

He scratches the top of his head. “Don’t know. Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you remember what it was like, to be eight and scared of the next day?” she says, staring right into his eyes. “Do you remember what it was like to be eight and _in_ the next day, sleepless and terrified?”

“Yes…” he answers softly.

“So don’t be.”

Missy reaches out for him with one hand that hovers in the air.

The hand he’d held two thousand years ago.

“I won’t let you be,” she promises, wiggling her fingers.

In the end, he takes a step forward and takes her hand in his. Because she’s right, because he’s not eight, but he’s still sleepless and terrified, and the next day brings him challenges he needs to solve as if he wasn’t. And… today, most of all, he’s lonely.

He was all of those things in the Academy, and he had Missy. He always had Missy. Missy and her hands to hold at night, when there was nothing else but fear.

The Doctor lies down on the left side of the yellow bed. It creaks underneath his weight. But it’s the weight of Missy’s eyes across from him that makes his insides creak with emotions unshed.

At first, he doesn’t even know if he will even be able to close his eyes. Or breathe in without feeling like his chest is closing in on itself. Two hearts, and they’re both useless when the lungs don’t work, either.

But Missy knows what the solution is, to dreams and tension alike. She offers him her hand, again. And he holds it tight, between their chests. She clasps the union of their hands so close to her, as if there was nothing else in the universe she might treasure. The smile on her face, the softness of her eyes… Maybe there isn’t. Maybe there never was.

She tries to reach him. All the history between them, he’s not entirely unsure this is where they’ve always been going. But he is entirely _sure_ of where he is.

“Missy… I—”

She doesn’t recoil, but doesn’t advance any more either. It is a kind of magic, all hers, that ability she has to not lose her smile, either. So many others have, when their lips crushed against his and he couldn’t reciprocate in the exact fashion they wished.

“It’s all right, you don’t need to explain yourself to me. I’m in your shadow, I’ve always been in your shadow, and I will always be. And that’s actually quite all right. Because you’re worth it. You’re worth all the spotlight, Doctor.”

He swallows.

“You know it’s still you and me. At the end of time, it’ll still be you and me. _Until_ … the end of time.”

“Even then,” Missy says. She is not looking away from his eyes. “Even after.”

She’s spoken of spotlight, but it is the Doctor who watches her until she closes her eyes—because she’s in his.

He notices a crease on her forehead that shouldn’t be there as she’s quiet and placid, falling asleep, and leans forward to kiss it away, even if his lips are but a brush of touch against her skin.

He remembers the monsters in the barn, and wishes this TARDIS was safe enough to keep hers at bay, even now.

* * *

_The tank is filled to the brim, and the fish will begin to die shortly. She taps it animatedly with the end of her parasol. Little useless, isn’t it? A parasol underground. It clicks nicely against the floor, like a third foot, when she walks._

_She watches the bubbles, so very clearly not a produce of simple water. Her giggles echo in the entire room. A few of the visitors turn to her, glaring at her like humans do. Judging, so very judging of what breaks their rules._

Oh, my, _she thinks._ How hard will you judge, then?

_She twirls, biting down another giggle, and finally abandons the darkness of the underground section. Upstairs, the exhibits gain in beige and small dashes of color, but she likes the blue hues down below. It’s a pity, really._

_There’s going to be a big puddle of_ red.

_The giggling gets uncontrollable on her way out, pushing out the big double door. She takes one last look at security, those big uniformed men with their big bleeping machines that it takes forever to go past. So much effort for nothing._

_They’re never where they should be. Today, she’s just here visiting, for the final flourish. But last night—oh, last night._

_Nobody notices when she walks away, a fair distance, enough to angle her parasol right against the streetwalk. A smirk crosses her face and, this time, the cackle of a maniac rises in her throat as the explosives in the fish tanks come alive._

_She stares as the building catches fire and blows on the end of her parasol as if it were a gun, satisfied._

_The screams are lovely to listen to._

_They almost drown it. That noise that sometimes makes rounds inside her head, calling to her. Saying her old name, her war name…_

Master.

* * *

“Missy.” Her chosen name. “ _Missy._ ”

Short for Mistress, once. An approach to the body she now inhabits, later. The name he says to her, now.

His hands gently shake her shoulders, and she opens her eyes from the blood and fire to his face hovering right above her, slightly frowning. Slightly, slightly. Always slight, always mighty.

When he pulls away, she remembers where she is, where they are. Adults, older than that, in many languages. Safe in his time machine, kept in one of his rooms, together, as if they were children, scared of the dark and the monsters their minds create in it.

She’s afraid that her mind just created one big enough for them both. Big enough, at least, for them both to see.

She sits up on the bed, her back against the wall, and waits for the question that he means to be asking but is thinking of the right words to.

The sheets beneath them are impossibly wrinkled, twisted. She must have thrashed through the night.

“Is it always like this?” he finally dares to ask.

She combs her loose hairs back into place, behind her ears, and nods meekly.

“Pretty much.”

He nods back, biting the edge of his lower lip, almost playing with the skin that comes off between his teeth.

“Nightmares?”

“Not quite.”

She wonders if she should tell him. If he will understand what she feels those dreams mean, in the long run. Gallifrey’s fall, she knows she helped with. She knows the body she did it in. But… she has never blown up museums for fun before.

“Prophetic dreams, I don’t know. Old memories, new ones to come.”

The Doctor stays in silence, eyes on her, for a long time, before speaking again. She thinks the worst in those moments.

“I saw a flash of it. Blue and red.”

“Blood diluted in water,” she confirms.

“How long has this been going on for?”

“It started after you came back.” She pauses, trying to remember when she had first seen Gallifrey in her dreams again. “A few weeks after that, yes.”

The Doctor keeps looking at her, like it was obvious, then he makes it so.

“You shouldn’t have these dreams…” he just says, putting an arm around her. When she leans her head against his shoulder, he kisses the top of it, softly. He grumbles: “Asking me if I sleep, when you haven’t been sleeping yourself.”

“I sleep, I just… wake in between.”

“Why’d you think this is happening?” he asks.

She sighs. She would have preferred not to talk about the dreams _further_ than the fact that they occur every night. Not even to discuss what she dreams about. She knows they’re reminders of who she was before she chose. Reminders of what she could be if she makes the wrong choice again, perhaps of what she unchangeably already is, regardless of what she chooses. And she knows the Doctor being back in her life, as a pillar of _good,_ might have something to do with that.

It’s just her old subconscious, playing tricks with her.

She used to dream of him a lot, too, when they were teenagers. It took becoming older, more tired, to realize why. To _come to terms_ with it.

She loved him then, she loves him now.

She was evil then, is she evil now?

Missy swallows uncomfortably. She has to tell the truth without telling it, so he won’t notice her stiffness or think anything of it. So she won’t feel like she’s lying to him about something important.

“Too much morality to wrap my head around when I’m awake, it comes back at me when I’m asleep.”

He actually guffaws. Then, when the sound of his laughter fades and he can hear her exhausted breath by his side, he turns to face her a little, lifts a hand to touch her cheek.

“You know,” he says, voice low, “I can help with that. I already rested, it’s your turn now…”

She nods, and his hand moves with the motion, but it moves upward, fingers curling slightly to position themselves against her temple. She closes her eyes and lets him in.

Such a vast, soft mind. Always knowing how to hide himself from those consciousnesses he enters. And yet he can feel him.

Slowly, gently blowing sleep into her very, very tired brain.

She smiles against his hand and is about to thank him, when the TARDIS phone rings in the silence, startling them both so much they actually bounce on the bed.

“Who can it be _now_?” she groans.

He immediately pops off the bed, almost grinning. He _welcomes_ it, having to put off rest in favor of running. He will never—can never—settle anywhere, the universe is his home, just like Missy has none.

“Advice and assistance obtainable immediately,” he quotes back to her. “Got to take it.”

Groaning again, Missy follows him all the way back to the console room, where he picks up the ringing phone.

If he expected adventure, maybe a little detour along the way to take a look at something nice, Missy knows by the way his face loses every last ounce of hope that the days of observing time pass by are over.

“What happened?” she asks when he hangs up.

“Clara,” he just says. His eyes are wells of fear. Worse than the ones that haunted them at eight years old. This is one he can’t vanquish so easily. “Someone has her. They want me for a ransom.”

The fact that he doesn’t even hesitate to wake up the engines of the TARDIS, not minding the last few hours, proves that the Doctor has learned all the lessons of humanity and chosen to overrule them anyway. Fleeting, tiny mortals as they are, unpredictably as they behave, the Doctor gets their distress calls and runs towards them as fast as he can. Because, after all, he loves them as if they were immortal. Or he tries.

Clara never saw that. Clara wasn’t there, two thousand years ago, in the shadow. She doesn’t understand the value of his trying.

Missy presses herself against one section of the hexagonal console.

“She left you,” she reminds him, face as hard as the metal she’s leaning against.

Clara burned down her hotel, marred all her hopes for a life, and blamed the Doctor for it all. The old Missy would have had so much fun torturing her, bringing her to her end. This Missy just watches from a distance and _knows_ that it’s not right for the Doctor to not even _think_ of what he gets in all of this _._

But, she supposes, he’s been doing this long enough. He just surveys her for a moment, telling her without telling her that he’s old enough, tired enough, to decide if he’s getting enough out of his friendships. And if that even matters.

The Doctor is all emotional weight and old pain when he pulls down the final lever to get the TARDIS into flight mode.

“They all leave me,” he just says.

Sometimes he leaves them first. To keep that from happening.

Sometimes, regardless of who has left first, he just has to come back.


	4. Become the raven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be considered a bit of a _Face the Raven_ (series 9) retelling! 
> 
> And, because of that, this chapter goes to [Mogamoka](https://twitter.com/Mogamoka2). (On BNHA they already faced their ravens, now it’s DW’s turn again! <3)

Without even the sound of leaves rustling against the street walk, what hope is there left? She can’t even be sure she is dead.

She has done this thousands of times. New situation, clues to follow, conclusions to be reached. Then, the solution in a Scottish accent. Back home, the memories would fade in victory, and she would be able to sleep without worrying. Next time, it would all be more of the same, and the thrill eventually should turn into comfort, safety.

It used to be like that.

She used to feel safe traveling to corners of the universe nobody living on Earth knew about, even when she saw their inhabitants lose everything they had there.

It took losing someone precious in two different corners of Earth to realize that nobody is ever safe. It doesn’t matter where you go, who you go with and hide behind. The universe is a punitive, lethal force that does not know the sluggish motion of slowness. It takes time, but it arrives in the end to reap you.

Away and forever.

Clara hoped that when the time came, she would face it bravely. After all, in everybody else’s stories she had witnessed up close, that is how it happened. People walked up to their fates, owned up to them.

She is just trapped in a house.

Two stories, three bedrooms, two bathrooms. And all of it useless. She keeps trying the tabs and the shower and the fridge and the TV, but they’re all dead and dry. Even the bookshelves—she has to assume that’s what they are because of the height of them—are empty.

The only thing to do to pass the time is run up and down the stairs. The only functional furniture in the house is the beds, chairs and couches. She knows which activity she will succumb to, in the end.

Without food or water, it is much smarter to stay still and watch time tick by in the giant clock in the living room. She has been tied to posts often enough with a problem-solving magician-looking old Time Lord. She knows the value of energy and patience, even when she’s had none. Especially because of that.

Eventually, Clara sleeps, tucked away and forgotten in a silent room in a silent street, somewhere she doesn’t know. When she woke up here, disoriented and alone, she screamed and hit the walls and glass until her throat and fists hurt. Now, there’s no point. There’s no one out there.

She is trapped in a house, like a doll waiting to be played with, and she is tired. She might as well sleep, she hasn’t in a while, and the silence will help. It should.

The next morning, her stomach cramps and her head hurts, but she rises like neither of it does and heads straight for the bathroom, forgetting that there’s no water. She stands in front of the mirror, watching the face of a Clara Oswald she doesn’t entirely recognize.

She has to, it’s the face she wears every day, but it wasn’t always. Something has been changing little by little, turning her into something she doesn’t like but cannot stop, no matter how hard she tries.

She stares and stares into her big brown eyes. There didn’t used to be bags under them.

Sighing, she turns her head to grab a towel and at least feign the motion of washing her face, and that’s when she sees it. Out of the corner of her eye, the ink.

She pushes her hair to one side and strains to catch a better glimpse of it.

It’s a number. A round number.

60, tattooed on the back of her neck. Like a bad dream, or a drunk night turned hangover in the morning, only she was perfectly sober.

She tightens the skin towards the mirror to get a better look at it. It’s impossible. If someone came in while she was sleeping, she would have heard _and_ woken up.

In her head, in that awful and sweet Scottish accent, she hears a reprimand.

_Wrong analysis. Ask a better question._

Yes, the how isn’t the question. The question is why. Why would anyone tattoo a sixty on the back of her neck? Why a sixty and why now?

Her heart skips a beat when she watches it change from 60 to 59, right in front of the mirror.

It’s not a tattoo. It’s not a clock, like the one downstairs.

It’s a countdown.

* * *

“Clara! Clara!”

He charges out of the TARDIS as if an entire battalion was ready to fight him on the get go. On the very last second, he catches the blue door and halts himself.

Missy sees what he refuses to, even from inside.

“It won’t be that easy.”

She steps into the routine of a weekday in London. Nobody even looks at them and the big police box from the fifties that just materialized itself in the middle of everything.

“She’s supposed to be _here._ ” He says, kicking a wall. Out of all the things that would fall down, he chooses something sturdier than himself. Missy watches in silence. “Why send me coordinates to get me lost if what they want is _me,_ not her?”

“You can’t be sure of what they want,” Missy says, her voice serious. “Never assume anything of the enemy.”

_Not even kindness,_ she adds in her head. She’s almost won like that too many times herself. Because he’d always think she had more potential for kindness, back in the days when she didn’t.

“What did they send, specifically?” she asks. As soon as he’s talking, thinking spirals around deductions, he’s not spiraling himself.

“Coordinates to _here._ This specific point in this specific place and time.” He tightens his fists. “She should be standing right here, held captive by someone who should be more than happy to make the exchange for me.”

“Then that doesn’t mean she’s here, it means they want _you_ here. They want you to look for her.” Missy’s tone approaches the emotion he might most need to hear. “It’s a game, sweetheart.”

This time, he punches the wall. Just once. He’s in control, so much so that he almost damages it more than it damages his knuckles.

“You’re assuming, too,” he mutters.

“I’m getting you moving. She’s not here, and that’s fact.” Missy clicks the tip of her parasol against the floor. “What more do you need, Doctor?”

That is what Clara herself used to say, too. _Get up off your ass and win._

He lifts himself up slowly, almost because he doesn’t know where to begin. When there is so much inside his head, how can he ever know? He just beats around bushes and hopes for the right idea to come out. Most times, he’s not even on the best track, he just improvises in a direction that makes it look so.

But he knows stories. And he knows London in as many timelines and realities as anyone living or dead ever has. He might as well be the only one that knows them all. No Time Lord has ever come here this much to learn them.

“There have always been rumors, stories passed from traveler to traveler,” he says. “Mutterings about…” He sighs. “Hidden streets.”

Missy grins at him.

“Wonderful. How do we find them? A keen _eye_ to spot the spatial _dye_?” She cocks her head slowly, pensive. “Or is it the other way around? Don’t you need to see the usual and the mundane in order to find something remarkable that has been hidden from view?”

He smirks back. “Bit of both.”

“Well, then all that’s left for me to _assume_ is that those coordinates put us close to the entrance. So… shall we?”

She takes his hand and they walk fast along the busy people of London. None of them notice anything. There have been literal invasions, beginning and ending in this city. People who saw them happening ran, people who didn’t kept walking forward, going to work and looking up at blue skies, probably wishing for something exciting to happen. They exist in their own bubble of humanity, which makes London the perfect place to hide anything.

The Doctor must have faced so many enemies here… And yet he’s done so loosely, happy to have one more adventurous day side-by-side with a companion. Right now, he’s as tense as he was, way back when, going into war alone.

Missy acts as his extra pair of eyes, as the shoulder he could cry on if he knew how, and she leads when he’s so lost he can only pretend to realize where he’s going.

In the end, it’s as easy as stepping somewhere they consciously know they shouldn’t. An empty alley with trash covering most of it. Unimportant, in the dark. Most people just walk by and ignore it. But it’s what they’re looking for, so they cannot.

The trash and the dark disappear at once after a few paces. If it looked like a cul-de-sac, now an entire street, serpentine and crooked, appears before their very eyes in browns and hanging houses.

“Voilà…” Missy says.

The Doctor doesn’t have the heart and is definitely not in the mood to reprimand her back for the use of French.

Streets are never empty, not of this size, not with these many buildings on either side of the pavement. Statistically, someone should be leaving home to rejoin the brightness of London after crossing the barrier. Statistically, a child should be going out to get food from the shops. Statistically.

And math never lies. Math might break down at the sight of the most beautiful of singularities out in the universe, but it never lies.

It is not even a statistic that Clara should be here. It is a promise he has been made and is depending on.

He grits his teeth. “Take that side,” he tells Missy. “I’ll take this one. Sonic me if you find her first.”

Missy doesn’t even reply or make physical contact to comfort him. She nods, taking orders she trusts in, and heads to her side of the street. He sonics at the first door he sees and rushes in.

Games are fine when he’s bored, when he hasn’t had anything remotely engaging to do for a month and a half and maybe most of another day, when he’d do anything for an intergalactic conflict to moderate before it goes haywire. But this is not a game, this is a provocation.

Someone’s phoned to say _see if you can find her,_ then hung up and not even shared a proper location.

This is a puzzle he must assemble without all the pieces.

And with a countdown taking place inside his head and stomach.

When facing the fourth door, he sonics and kicks, and the scream—shrill and territorial at once—is everything he’d needed.

“It’s okay! It’s alright, it’s me!” He throws both hands in the air.

But Clara, although she ceases to scream, doesn’t seem any less terrified.

He remembers, somehow, to sonic Missy first. To pull her back to his side. And then kneels by the couch where Clara’s been sitting, jiggling her leg so hard there might be a dent on the floor the size of her high heel.

“You came for me?” she asks. “How did you…?”

He smiles softly. “Know? I got a call, someone’s _very_ interested in—”

“Doctor,” she interrupts, “something’s happened to me.”

That shuts him up. Clara learned that trick once—either get his attention quickly, bluntly, or watch him ramble to tell him much later—, but she forgot. Now that time is short, it’s coming back to her in her own urgency. She doesn’t even explain in choppy sentences, she just turns her neck to him and pushes her hair up so he can see.

“Oh,” he says.

“What number is it at?” she mutters. “I haven’t… wanted to look.”

“Is that a number? I can’t tell. Might need glasses.”

“Doctor.”

“40.” He gives it away as if it was heavy to say.

Missy comes barging in, panting slightly at the entrance as she leans on her closed parasol.

“Oh, you found her. Good.” She smiles at Clara. “Hi.”

The Doctor arches both eyebrows at her.

“Problem,” he says. “Very. Big. Problem.”

“Alright. Problem, yes. But what do we do? You’re good at this. You’re… _very_ good at this. What is it? How do we stop it?” Clara glances at him with those big sad eyes, looking for the magic solution that she has seen him give to thousands of other people in thousands of other places. “You’re here now. Both of you. You must know what this is, right?”

The Doctor and Missy look at each other.

“Chronolock. Time locks on to you,” Missy explains.

“And what happens when it reaches zero?” Clara asks, starting to breathe in a little too fast. It’s not like she hadn’t pictured something horrible, but the reality of what can actually come to pass is hitting her now.

“The Shade—” The Doctor swallows audibly. “—takes you.”

“You die?”

“You die,” he confirms. “Normally it takes the shape of a bird, culturally a raven.”

“Symbol of death for a reason…” Missy adds in low voice.

“Not helping!” Clara says shrilly. She has tears welling up in her eyes. The number in her neck keeps dropping.

The Doctor and Missy share another quick glance.

“Plan?” he asks her.

“Empty street?” she suggests with half a shrug.

“Okay!” he says, jumping to his feet at once and offering Clara a hand. “Well, it’s a start.”

The three of them abandon the house Clara has been trapped in to walk the street. The Doctor turns around in every direction, even facing the gray sky above.

“Nothing as far as the eye can see,” he says. “We have gone in a few of these houses and it’s the same. Now—” He puts his hands on Clara’s shoulders, tenderly. “—whoever took you here, whoever gave you that… Did you see them at any moment? Did you notice anything about how they operated, how they left you? Did they let anything slip in your presence?”

Clara keeps staring at him. She can feel her heartbeat and the tick tock on her neck. The tears begin falling now. She cannot stop them, she has been meaning to do more than just cry for so long, alone in there, without hope or voice to so much as beg for it.

“I just woke up in there, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened, I’m—” She bites her lower lip. Hard. “This is going to sound so stupid, but I left you.” She gives out a weak laugh. “I left you and burned down the hotel and now you’re trying to save me.”

“Hey…” he calls to her. When she looks up, there he is, the face she remembers, the stupid grin that never failed to lift everyone’s spirits in the end. He tips up her chin. “Don’t focus on that now. There really isn’t anything you can tell me?”

She shakes her head and begins crying silently.

Missy clicks her parasol against the street tile as the Doctor cups Clara’s face, that tiny face too wide for normal mirrors, and tries to cheer her up like he would any other day, without her entire world ending. Again.

“What about the TARDIS?” Missy suggests, voice firm and serious. “Fly away somewhere. The Chronolock might disable.”

“Or go off,” the Doctor says, almost grumbles in retort. “I won’t take that chance.”

“Or maybe it just won’t freeze,” Clara says softly. “Remember the mummy?”

The Doctor is speechless for a second.

“The mummy on the Orient Express?” she goes on. “Once the death is locked, nobody could cheat it away. The mummy got to everyone it had chosen, no matter how far away they moved.”

The Doctor, then, opens his eyes wide.

“Not everyone,” he says. “Not _me._ ”

Clara’s head immediately shoots up so she can pierce his eyes with her own. She regains confidence and stubbornness as she straightens up, all in one tiny little gaze that she can hold indefinitely.

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Here’s one more thing you don’t know about the lock on your neck, Clara,” he says slowly. “One very important thing I’d forgotten: you can pass it on.”

He is beginning to understand so many things at once his head hurts. It spins and spins with information, with analysis comparing mummies and ravens, Clara and Doctor.

And Missy chuckles dramatically in their background, because she has understood as well, and because Clara’s not far behind.

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Clara asks, her tone getting shriller and shriller. “ _This_ is why they want you here. To kill you.”

“Well, what a piss-poor way to do it,” Missy comments to herself. “I would have done it better, to be honest.”

“I don’t know,” the Doctor says to Clara, and he’s not lying.

However much he suspects, all he knows is they wanted him here, not Clara. If they meant for her to die, they would have dispatched her already. They just used her to ensure he’d show up, the Chronolock acting as a mere way to guarantee he would come to fetch her and wouldn’t leave her behind at the first sight of danger.

He can survive the Shade, so might Missy if she’s got regenerations left (and he won’t ask that of her), but no human ever could.

Clara… Clara and her petiteness, her wide face and her big brown eyes, so sad and so lively in the same blink. Clara couldn’t survive a Chronolock carried to term.

He can’t see past that. Past the shadow taking over and past the first time he came across her, this Clara who in the beginning knew nothing of the Internet until it flooded her brain. All those jokes he’s made about her looking old like him, about her being too much like him… and at the very end of their companionship she showed him how human she was even to him and she was right. At the end, she is so human all he wants is to keep her safe, no matter how much hurt she’s brought to people he also cares about. To him.

She’s so human she’s putting him first, no matter how much he’s made her hurt, too.

“Why else would they do this?” Clara asks him now. “Putting me in a cage? Risking one stupid innocent life? For what? You never come when you’re called, not at this expense. I know that, I’ve always known that. You don’t play games.”

“This isn’t a game,” he says. He doesn’t dare look out of the corner of his eye and see the number on Clara’s neck now. It’s counting down, always counting down.

She takes one deep breath.

“I said goodbye to you, didn’t I?” she says, more thinking out loud as the ideas develop than actually talking to him. “That means I’m just one of them now. One of the tiny little humans you lump together. I know what happens to those tiny little humans. It’s so predictable, Doctor. We’ve seen it so many times, I actually thought I was free of it. Imagine that.”

“You are. You’re not listening to me.”

Clara sniffles in her tears and snot. The skin under and around her nose is all red.

“Danny’s dead,” she says. “And all my life was you. That’s not very healthy, is it?”

Somewhere far, somewhere close, a raven caws. It cannot be escaped, as it cannot be ignored. It announces itself before it flies in, so there is time where no time is left. A last mercy.

The Doctor’s eyes pop wide open. So many deaths along the many lives he’s had, and nothing is as terrifying as the thought of that raven coming any closer to Clara.

“It’s okay, it’s fine. It won’t hurt, I know it won’t.” Clara’s smiling as she says that, and he winces because she is. She doesn’t know that all deaths hurt. “I’ll be with him, in the end.”

“I can’t get any of you back, Clara,” Missy warns her, but her tone is so flat one might think this is the outcome she’d expected and … almost desired. “My matrix is gone. You’ll really be dead.”

And the Doctor is thankful for that warning. For that blame being placed on a verbal tense that distributes it evenly.

Clara takes the Doctor’s hands, but so slightly, so very very slightly, that she can only reach a very few fingers, enough to squeeze them once.

He really doesn’t want to look at the number on her neck.

“Better me than him,” she tells Missy, but she’s looking at the Doctor, whose eyes have too begun to well up with unshed words and unsaid tears. “The universe needs him.”

She’s about to pull away from his hand into the darkness, into the path of the raven that’s cawing closer, but he holds on to her.

“Here’s one thing I haven’t told you about the Chronolock, Clara,” the Doctor confesses softly. “You can only pass it on if both parts agree. Mutual agreement to partial death, if you will.” He tries to hold on to her hand, and he _begs._ “You have to let me take it.”

“And why would I do that?” Clara asks.

“Oh, I don’t know…” he says in exasperation. “The name Chronolord mean anything to you people? ’Cause it’s not for show.”

Clara mumbles a question to Missy and she quickly fills the gaps of ancient Time Lord history that the Doctor might not have shared with her.

“ _Plus,_ ” he adds. “I got regenerations to spare after Trenzalore.”

“You only _suspect_ you do,” both Missy and Clara say.

“Good enough for me,” he replies. “The point is… I’m not dying here, they need me. Otherwise, what’s all of this for? Bring in someone I care about? Torture them for days on end? Torture them till the _end_?” He laughs. “Shock value? Really?”

And, even though he is not about to have a chat about it with the two of them, he is aware that he has let enough people die to save himself and his main team, immortals or not. Collateral damage, Missy would call it. He calls it what it is, casualties. And he always aims to minimize them, but he doesn’t always succeed.

There was a man once in a Nuclear Bolt. A man the Doctor should have never left behind in the first place. He could have regenerated first, then ran after the Master. An immortal always has more time, a human might not.

He would like to think he has thoroughly learned that lesson. That’s why he’s here, making this stand. Because he ran after the Master too early that day, and regenerated later to save the man trapped in a Nuclear Bolt as if he hadn’t bent time to do so.

_Wilfred Mott, you do have all the answers!_

“You’re really not dying?” Clara asks him.

Even if he was, he’d lie. He had to lie to Wilfred, too.

Now, he just smiles. He can see the number on her neck now.

“Oh, I’m dying, alright. But it’ll be plenty like last time. Bit of color, bit of light. New Doctor sauntering away.”

Clara observes him for a moment, trying to catch him at the lie. When she is absolutely sure by the honest and upward arch of his eyebrows that he’s not trying to pull a trick, she just… gives up. A new Doctor is better than no Doctor, she knows that well from last time.

“Alright, I consent.”

“You can’t do this—” Missy tries, raising her voice and lifting her parasol as if it were a rifle.

“Missy,” he says, locking eyes with her now as if there was nothing else on this street, no Chronolock or time itself. “When it happens, take her away and run. They want a Time Lord, they might be ready to bargain for two.”

“You can’t let her do this. She destroyed everything, she left you, she—” Missy stammers, unbelieving, unable to understand.

It is one thing to not wish this upon either of them, neither Clara nor Doctor, and another one entirety to want Clara to pass it on.

“She’s my friend. I don’t give up on my friends. And I don’t, ever, let them die for me.” There it is, in his eyes. The shared memories. _Regenerate!_ “I don’t know if that’s a measure of goodness, Missy. But it’s a measure of who the Doctor is. And I happen to like being the Doctor.”

He turns to Clara now.

“Tell me I can have it. Those exact words, I think, or it won’t work,” he says softly.

“You can have it…” Clara whispers.

A shadow climbs out of her neck, curling into ink-like smoke or smokey spirals of ink. For a moment, it floats and vibrates in the air, asking to be invited in, then it slithers slowly onto the new home it is to be locked in. The Doctor welcomes it in with an ample breath, with the closing of his eyes. He can hear Clara breathe free by his side, Missy dragging her feet on the tarmac. So much for one choice, so many people involved in it. And yet if it’s the right one, he can only just embrace it as it comes.

Even when the raven caws, wings fluttering on the opposite end of the street—a final warning—, the Doctor stands his ground. After all, a Chronolocked death can only be passed on once.

“What’s the number?” he asks softly.

Nobody says anything. They’re wondering, still. This life, this life he calls his twelfth, is extra. Given to him on the edge of all things without choice or explanation. The cracks in time closed and he never got to learn whether an extra life was payment enough or there was more to it. He supposed there was always _more,_ because he’d been brought up that way.

He takes a few steps forward.

“No. No, no, no…” Clara whimpers behind him. She must see it, then. The number.

He doesn’t look back. The raven’s flying in, ethereal and deadly, in a straight trajectory that will not—cannot—miss him.

“Missy…” he says. “Run away now. Go.”

“What if _they_ kill you?” she says.

“Missy, there’s no time for this now!”

The raven is getting closer.

“You regenerate, sure. But whoever wants you dead must know. If they hurt you while you’re regenerating—”

“Missy, go. Now.”

“I can’t let them.”

He should answer to that, probably. That he’s stood there before, in the brink of a double death and a double regeneration. And that it only takes a second, a stray bullet. Nobody can defend him in that state of utmost vulnerability.

_We face death squarely together._ An ancient Time Lord saying. It makes sense. No one wants to die the final death alone and vulnerable, they want a hand to hold, beautiful eyes to see their own reflection in as the sparkling yellow fades into death. It was supposed to be Missy’s and his fate, standing brave opposite the face of their final deaths.

So he’s got to hope this isn’t it. Because if whoever’s planned it means to have him dead by the end of it, they honestly could have done better. Missy really would have.

Alone now, he simply, quite simply, faces his raven. Such a magnificent, enigmatic creature formed of ash and shadow to kill and reap souls. It’s coming for him, trying to get him scared and ready, but he can only admire all the characteristics that make others fear it.

He can only do what Time Lords are trained to do in their early beginnings and never again get to perform quite as operatically in their long fruitful lives.

He smiles, chin up, and raises his arms to meet the raven squarely. Its beady eyes squint at him before it charges, before the Doctor pulls his arms back a little and takes the bird in, all in, becoming the raven as it dissolves into smoke and yellow sparks. They’re porous and they burn at touch even if they hover, covering every inch of his skin a second before it begins.

There is no point in delaying it.

“Stand back,” he breathily manages.

When he explodes into energy that pulses, circles in and outside him, the entire street seems to be submerged into the heart of a star. The most beautiful sight in the universe, privy to a few, now torn inside out for safe watching.

A Doctor emerges from it, the clothes a little bigger than they looked a minute or two ago, and Missy makes a tiny noise in the back of her throat as she breeches the distance between them and tries to help. Regenerations are always off to a rough start, a bit like being born. Tender skin, shaky legs, and a new everything.

“Am I ginger by any chance?” the Doctor whispers quickly to Missy, making an interested face at the noticeable change of pitch and reaching out for Missy’s upper arm so there’s somewhere to hold on to during the regeneration high.

“Not ginger, no. But I think you’re wearing a bit of _a new body_ right there, if you catch my meaning.” The Doctor gingerly looks down at the new everything and replicates the same noise Missy just made at seeing it. “How are we feeling about regenerating pronouns as well, hm? Match mine? It’ll make some conversations _aw_ fully impossible to follow.”

“Ooooh!” the Doctor says. “Brilliant! Yes! _She/her_. Nice break from all those _hims_ and _hes._ Love that consonantal sound right there, so soothing. Like a shower.”

The sudden echo of clapping in an empty space reaches their ears. Slow, tortuous clapping.

“So it is you. The Doctor, most famous Time Lord in all Gallifrey. Oh, how I have _longed_ to find you.”

Leaning on Missy, the Doctor looks up at the newcomer, a woman of short stature and enigmatically scary gaze. The Doctor’s longer, blond hair partially covers her right eye.

“You want me? Good, great, everyone does. Send me a nice distress signal, I’ll come round for a chat. But you do not pull this off, especially not if you have any hope whatsoever that I’ll play along afterwards.”

“Oh, but I think you will, Doctor.”

“Who are you?” Clara asks firmly. She has paths of tears, already drying, on her cheeks. She quickly walks to stand by Missy and the Doctor, and her firmness only grows. “What do you want that you can’t _ask_ for it like everyone else does?”

“Not you, humans,” the newcomer says disdainfully. “Although you have been very good at asking the same question I wanted answered.”

“And have you gotten what you wanted already?” the Doctor says through gritted teeth. “Because I am burning very hot, and have things to do.”

“I wanted the Doctor,” the newcomer says simply. “It is known the Doctor doesn’t always travel alone, so how was I to know whoever picked up the phone was who I wanted? A simple test would suffice. Everyone has heard the legend of Trenzalore, I only had to use it to my means. And I have.”

“But how did you even get that number? No one has that number.”

“ _Please_.” The newcomer smirks. “You think we don’t keep track of all the stolen TARDISes? Especially such a famous—or should I say notorious—one?”

If the street was quiet, now it’s borderline noiseless. Not even a breath echoes off the walls of the houses.

The Doctor stares at the woman in front of her. It’s impossible. She and her old selves made sure of it, made sure to rectify past mistakes and ensure no future ones would be made in that regard.

The newcomer is not even wearing clothes that give it away, just perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill attire that could place her as an inhabitant of a thousand million planets alone.

The Doctor blows the hair out of her face and stands up straight. Missy’s hand remains on the small of her back and the Doctor will never admit it, but she needs that hand there as a reminder that she might be vulnerable, but not alone.

“Who are you?” the Doctor almost barks at the woman. “And what do you want with me?”

“My name is Gat. You don’t know me.” Gat smirks widely, almost cat-like. “I’m from home.”

Home. She can see it, that old planet.

The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, and when they caught the light every morning, it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches like a song. Pastures of red grass, stretching far across the slopes of Mount Perdition. She used to run across those fields all day, calling up at the sky.

All gone, in a moment. In the Moment.

All gone, when time was unwound and Gallifrey split into two. The one that she burned, lost forever; and the one that she saved, gone into a bubble not even her TARDIS can breach. Gone for the sake of all creation.

“Gallifrey burned,” Missy says.

“Gallifrey’s _still_ burning,” Gat corrects her. “When dear, dear Doctor trapped us all in an inescapable sphere at the end of the universe, she wasn’t just trapping _us_ there, was she?”

Missy glares at the Doctor with the rage of a Time Lord who has always been too alone. However much she has always despised her kind, Missy longs for a home, for a people. Someone to look in the mirror with and seem a resemblance of herself in, no matter how frail. If she could ever have it back and fix it, she would.

“How many Daleks?” Clara asks. She was there the day it happened. In the fleeting memory Gat is giving back now, she might still remember some of it from the nebulous blur that day was in which so many Doctors stood, with her in the middle of it all, her as the heart of all timestreams. The Doctor’s timestream.

“Enough,” Gat answers. “I wouldn’t have been sent here otherwise.”

Then, the Doctor laughs. She laughs and laughs, so frilly and for so long that it feels like she will never stop, not even to take a breath. She already silenced the universe once, she might fill it with noise now if only to stop the nonsense happening right in front of her.

“And what do you want me to do about it?” she says.

Her laughter doesn’t die out, it grows in intensity, and it does more than bring noise, it brings out a pain inside her that she didn’t think had been there during her twelfth life.

None of the people alive in that version of Gallifrey _know_ what she did the first time around. And none should want to know. But she’s fresh out of the regeneration oven, a little too pissed off, and bamboozled at the idea and excruciating reality of a Time Lord having escaped her bubble to get her back in it.

When the laughter fades, the Doctor can almost see how much Gat wishes it hadn’t before any actual words leave her mouth.

“Now, you listen to me, I already won that war. By burning a planet out of existence. Do you know what that does to a conscience?” The Doctor treads furiously towards the foreign Time Lord, invading her personal space, baring her teeth. “However much kindness that Council deserves, I don’t know. But the people down in Arcadia, in every last city, didn’t deserve to burn. So they got their little pocket of existence back. Don’t ask me to go back there and watch them. Because I might just make the same choices again, all for the sake of a righteousness I don’t believe in anymore.” Slowly, like a predator eyeing its prey, the Doctor steps back towards Missy and Clara. “I won’t win that war again. There is no war. That’s the point.”

“You put the war in a bubble, it goes on infinitely, even if it is on a smaller scale.” Missy grits her teeth. “The children keep screaming as they die, Doctor.”

“And the Time Lords sit in their chambers, plotting to ascend! Do you think the children matter to them? No!”

“Some care about the children,” Gat adds, softly. “That’s why I was sent here to—”

“No offense, love, whoever you are, but all they want is to break the bubble so they can ascend into their new state of destructive consciousness and take the rest of the universe down with them. They’re in a bubble for a reason.”

The only reason Gallifrey didn’t burn a second time was the children.

Clara stares straight at the Doctor now, because she was there that second time, crying as she stood in the hologram that showed her Gallifrey in the final days of that war. What _should_ have been and _was_ the final day, once.

She knew, as she still knows, that the Doctor’s reign of terror always is to end with the sight of the first crying child.

“Then go back,” she says now. “Help them beat the Daleks, and never bring that bubble down. But help the children.”

_Do what you’ve always done,_ she’d said then. _Be a Doctor._

She and the Doctor, they’ve always gone back for the children. No matter the danger, no matter the circumstances, no matter the consequences. Because Clara is a school teacher and has a duty of care, and the Doctor is a traveler with a box that always intervenes if she notices children crying.

“If I go back…” the Doctor says now, tired, so so tired she doesn’t think she can so much as finish the sentence. Clara and Missy, they don’t understand. Each has a different version of the Time War in their memories. Clara only remembers, and vaguely, the one in which the Doctor saved the day. And Missy only remembers the destruction, the misery, and the charred rocks in space where a living planet used to be. “They won’t let me leave again. Don’t you see? It’s a trap.”

A trap on a trap street.

“Is that your final answer?” Gat asks calmly.

And something glimmers in her eyes as she takes a couple of casual steps towards them, breaching the distance that so far she has kept in all naturality when the Doctor invaded it forcefully.

The Doctor stands in front of Missy and Clara, arms stretched open like wings before them.

“Yes, it is,” the Doctor replies just as calmly. She turns a quarter of her face back to her friends and says, barely breathing, barely in a speed anyone can understand: “I want you to run. Don’t argue. Don’t you dare. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how she got here, but she can get back, and if she wants me to go, that means she can get back with at least someone else. Run!”

There were times in which the Doctor didn’t think anything could be worse than a Time War. Now she knows, because she’s lived one, that there is: a Time War your loved ones have no choice but to exist in, too.

Missy grabs Clara’s wrist and pulls away at her. They run together, they run away. And the Doctor watches, relieved that they are allowed to.

Until Gat’s smirk grows.

“I need reinforcements to take you and your ship back without your full cooperation,” Gat says to her slowly. “Your friends, however…”

The sentence runs inconclusive. Gat reveals a small device tied around her wrist and presses a button on it. She materializes a few steps behind Missy and Clara, at the juncture between the trap street and real London.

When they try to cross, something stops them.

Missy tries to sonic at the invisible barrier, and then Gat laughs, and the Doctor runs to them in desperation, in astonishingly precise anticipation of the next course of action.

“Your friends are human, Doctor,” Gat finishes, getting hold of Clara’s wrist. “And they’ll pass cleanly through with me.”

Clara struggles free once, tries to move away again. The Doctor’s still too far away. All her lives, mocking vortex manipulators, now she could really use one, just to teleport _there,_ with them, and punch that Time Lord square in the face _._

Finally, Gat corners Clara and Missy against the façade of a house, menacingly slow. This time, she grabs Clara as tight as she can, and no matter how hard Clara tries, there’s no getting away.

Missy wastes no time. She punches at Gat, and a streak of blood comes running down the Gallifreyan’s nose, but still she doesn’t let go. A brief smirk crosses her bruising face, even.

“You won’t save our children? I will take yours,” Gat says. Her eyes lock on the Doctor’s as she approaches the scene, as she sprints closer, hoping, pointing her sonic at the device and using it, even though she knows it’s not going to work. “Let it serve as a reminder.”

And then… they’re gone. Neatly, cleanly. Gone.

The Doctor arrives to cross the space they just ceased to inhabit, her breath heavy with effort and the mess of a regeneration she has rushed too much in order to be at a peak that’s been for nothing.

Too many emotions are going through her, too many emotions and fourteen lives. How could she hold her ground now?

She falls on her knees, and strands of blond hair cover her face as she does. Missy is sure she’s crying, but she can’t tell, so she just kneels with the Doctor, pushing all the hair away, putting an arm around her, and offering support in the whirlpool of unbalance.

Immediately, it starts to rain on them, but this is London. It rains two-hundred days a year. It’s nothing special that it does as well on the day they’ve taken the last of the Doctor’s children away where she can never reach them again. All because she did want to save Gallifrey’s children, once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because of the AU situation, Gat (from series 12) appears in a different role than she did in canon and disregarding what happened to her there.
> 
> [I love the series 12 twists and can’t wait to use them in a fic, but I have a friend who hasn’t seen the latest seasons and in case they’re reading me, I try to keep the spoilers very decontextualized and mellow]
> 
> For those curious, the regeneration song in the series playlist ~~and in my head~~ was _Hero_ by Really Slow Motion. Particularly minute 1:26!


	5. To be returned

_In the not-too-distant-future…_

* * *

“Bill?” Heather is leaning on the foyer wall. “Going to be much longer?”

She looks at her phone. They’re— _Bill_ is, really—going to have to hurry up a bit if they want to make it to their first class. The bus always makes it to the stop on time, so she’s already counting on them having to wait for the next. They _always_ have to wait for the next.

A pop-up notification interrupts her trail of thought.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Bill comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and smelling like an excess of mint toothpaste. Her collarbones, showing in this outfit, are still shiny and a little bit wet.

She just grabs a piece of already cold, dry toast and sits on one of the barstools by the counter to try and lace up her boots with one hand.

“Quickly getting the job done,” Bill says. “Quick as I can, anyway.” She looks up at Heather and grins her best good girl smile. “Little help?”

Heather chuckles and crosses her arms. “You can tie your own shoelaces.”

In fact, and despite her own complaints, Bill finishes a few moments after, biting down on the toast when she needs both hands, and tours around the open area that makes up most of the place.

“Wait,” she says. “Bag.”

She runs to the bedroom to get it, a strand hanging over her shoulder, and when she comes back, she finds Heather holding back laughter and offering Bill her jacket because she knows all too well that Bill has already forgotten it.

“ _Now_ can we go?” Heather teases, smiling. She gets small dimples on both sides of her mouth when she smiles, Bill always stops whatever she’s doing to look at them, so maybe it’s not a good idea to flash them now. She still can’t help it.

It normally earns her uncontainable affection. Like now, with Bill leaning towards her to press a chaste and sweet kiss on her lips.

Bill’s phone beeps with a new text message, interrupting them.

“One second. Just… one second…” She takes off her backpack to rummage for it. Once she’s read the text, she unlocks it and puts the phone back in her pocket. “Hey, did the landlady text you?”

“Yeah,” Heather says, finally opening the door so they can leave. “Why?”

“She’s begging me to get you to reply. In big ugly words.”

Bill locks the apartment door and puts the keys in her other pocket. Both of them head for the stairs.

“Well, not to use a big, ugly word, but fuck her. She keeps asking for earlier payments. One of these days it’ll be, what, two a month? It’s ridiculous…”

“Hey.” Bill stops on the old staircase for a moment. She grins at Heather. She doesn’t have dimples, but her eyes shine with so much hope that Heather, when she first saw them, believed it was impossible for one single human being to express so much so beautifully. “We’ll figure it out. I have a double shift today after class. And…” She shrugs. “Well, you never know, do you? Something wonderful can happen anyway. Anything can.”

Heather nudges at her to continue walking down the stairs and laughs. Their steps echo on the space between floors.

“Count on Ms. Potts to say something like that, like we’re in _Beauty and the Beast._ ”

Bill snorts, but she can’t help it, she begins almost humming, almost singing.

_Tale as old as time…_

* * *

The inevitability of walking among this planet’s youth and being reminded of their own, those times of being teenagers, rebels, students, was almost predicted. Practically sought for.

In order to get over the past, nothing better than to remind the brain of an older past, make it forget about recent events. Flood it with memories so it will destroy the newest ones.

At least, that was the strategy, months ago, when they landed, wet and distraught, from London into Bristol. Forget by remembering.

But it was a silent agreement, and now a stroke of luck, that gets them to stay. Missy still wonders if a few summer months watching the vacancy at St. Luke’s stay vacant has been enough to entice the Doctor’s sleeplessness into old patterns.

She wonders if skipping a few years forward will make it easier to forget what was taken away. What in 2015 family members have to simply mourn, not knowing.

The only answer she and the Doctor have found to the never-dying question of grief is the timeless solution to all their problems: forward.

An entire summer in a quiet TARDIS didn’t feel like _forward._

But now here they are, and there’s youngsters everywhere, walking in every direction. They go places, and change course when they realize they’re heading for the wrong building. They just _stop_ in the middle of everyone’s way and promptly turn back.

The Doctor laughs as she and Missy make for their part of campus. They used to be like that, too. Young and careless, in an Academy that wanted to squeeze the carelessness and the youth out of them and never did quite manage to.

_Were we ever this beautiful?_ Missy wonders privately.

Groups of twenty-somethings chuckle and say hello to them when they walk past them. The Doctor says hello back, bubbly in a way she hasn’t been for an entire season, an entire quarter of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. But they don’t know that, they just see the rainbow in the storm. Missy has weathered the storm, cradled the storm and the sea, saved the smallest boat in it from sinking, rescued its captain from drowning.

And from floating on calmer waves that lulled them both to a sleep that never came, Missy thought, drenched on seawater and rain alike, the same she does now.

_You were. You’ve always been beautiful._

“Popular, are we?” the Doctor says with a full grin on her face.

“Very,” Missy says. “It’s the lipstick.”

Even as they enter the building where they’re supposed to be teaching this semester, the greetings don’t seem to be stopping any time soon.

At one point, Missy almost flirts with one of the humans, replicating behavior patterns she was very used to, back in the day. The Doctor grabs her by the sleeve.

“Oi! You can’t do that. Rules! Job… rules.”

“Well, if they don’t want _this,_ ” Missy says, gesturing down at her ankle-length purple skirt, “why the insistence?”

The Doctor tries not to look puzzled. “People are nice.”

They casually lean back on their classroom door once they’ve found it and observe the people passing by. A couple of students, a tall black girl and a smaller white girl giggle together when they walk past. The tallest waves hello with a grin.

“See?” the Doctor says condescendingly to Missy. “Nice.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, because I don’t know. But _that_ does not look like plain nice to me.”

The Doctor crosses her arms and tries not to laugh.

“Then what does it look like?”

“Something weird and human that makes a lot more sense when they’re out of earshot.” Missy makes a face.

Now, the Doctor cannot help it. A tiny little laugh escapes her.

“You’re not going to follow the next humans around just to figure that one out.” She doesn’t even bother trying to sound the exact and right degree of educational. “Besides, it’s time to be good at school infiltration. Can’t do that if we’re being spies.”

“That door is probably locked,” Missy points out, looking at it with a smirk. “Did you ask anyone for the key?”

The Doctor smirks back, the clearest wordless expression of _who said I needed a key to pick a lock?_ She’s never needed one, except for wooden doors—those are an entirely different story.

Maybe it’s not the smartest idea to use a sonic screwdriver in plain sight when prospective students can be walking by, pooling in corners waiting for more respectable-looking professors to show up, but the Doctor breathes the opposite of smart ideas, she inhales absurdity and exhales creativity and disaster combined into order.

It’s also fairly easy to hide a screwdriver in ample coat sleeves. Even the noise could be disguised as a text alert.

“Off you pop,” the Doctor says with a wave of her free hand, keeping the door open for Missy with the other.

They’re early, as they like to be, and use that time to get everything ready. Even as their technology progresses, humans are still not that advanced computer-wise. They should, at least concerning astronomy. Better equipment would take them further and further, closer to the stars they so wish to reach one day, but they learn slow and live too little to pass on enough knowledge at sufficient speeds. They don’t even have ways to fully record a person’s whole life experience, only parts, and only manually. It’s no wonder even the greatest minds feel so isolated from everyone else sometimes. Without huge matrixes that go back eons, what comfort could they possibly find in their dead and the lives of their ancestors?

Missy pushes herself up on the desk as the Doctor gets the computer and projector going. The two of them, they’ve lived like this a long time. Long enough to empathize with that human loneliness, that solitude of the mind. And yet it still confuses Missy, because the humans are not aware of it. The humans have not known a _before._ Perhaps that’s why their genetic sadness is subdued. Why this past summer has been a reflection of eternal grief.

They wait until the classroom is sufficiently full to dim the lights and, even then, the Doctor stands in silence behind the computer, signaling for Missy to hold on a bit more, in case someone else is coming.

Then, she abandons whatever little refuge a desk and a wide computer screen may offer and stands in front of the auditorium.

“Um, hello, everyone,” she says. “My name is the—”

“Try again,” Missy whispers behind her, still sitting on the desk.

“My name _is_ John Doe.”

“ _Jane_ Doe _._ Or Jane Smith,” Missy whispers through a smile. “Mix them up all you like, but at least get the first name right.”

“Jane Smith. Here to teach.” The Doctor chuckles nervously. “Too many fake IDs as a teenager.”

Then, Missy clears her throat to speak up to the class.

“And _I_ am Missy. Short for Misericordia.” She pauses neatly, awaiting the chorus of laughter that doesn’t take long to come. “Very terrible parents, I know.”

But, in a quite predictable way in hindsight, the laughter among students doesn’t die down. It’s not obtrusively loud, all mumbled and muttered from one person to the next, with the occasional comment, yet it _remains._

They press on regardless.

“Ms. Smith— _Mrs._ Smith and I will be sharing the wonders of _General Astronomy I_ this year,” Missy begins.

“Normally, the way this goes is you get one professor half the semester, another professor the other half—” The Doctor shrugs nonchalantly, wrinkling her nose a little bit because a full shrug can never be reached until incorporated into the face as well, “—but we work better as a pair.”

Missy claps once and steps off the desk.

“So you’d better be ready for some planets!”

Despite the room trying hard to achieve some silence for her final sentence, someone can’t help but let out a tiny giggle.

“Oh, god, this is like Halloween had come early this year…” some kid complains in one of the middle rows. “Halloween but space-themed. I should’ve never transferred here…”

The Doctor turns back to glance at Missy, who’s as taken aback as she is. They really have stepped up to teach on their first day in the same outfits they arrived in months ago. Why would they have problems because of that? They never have up in space, with foreign species that sometimes are nudist species, more likely to judge clothes at all than Earth humans would the wrong ones.

Or so one might presume.

“I think…” the Doctor mutters, “we really need to get out of these clothes.”

Missy tries to look at the two of them from an outsider’s perspective, from a _human_ ’s perspective who thinks them professors in a respectable school.

She almost chokes with laughter at the sight of herself in Victorian nanny attire and the Doctor looking every bit like a tiny creature in magician clothes that are a little too big for her.

“Oh, yes, we do, sweetheart.”

* * *

“No. Mmmm: no. No, no, no. Also no.” Missy throws the hangers onto a pile, and she does so with a passion. “When was the last time you went shopping? I’m assuming… that was before Houdini left you some spares?”

“Shut up…” the Doctor says. She’s in her underwear, standing small in the corner of their allotted changing room. “People presuppose Houdini. Why Houdini?”

Missy shrugs nonchalantly, inspecting the next bombastic outfit that still dangles from the wall hook.

“There’s plenty of other famous magicians in history!”

“Stay still.” Missy drapes the outfit over the Doctor. “See? This says _not magician._ ”

“What do you want my clothes to say?” The Doctor grabs her wrists to stop her from measuring colors and looks on her. “Clothes don’t have to say anything. And it’s not like we’re hiding.”

Missy raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t we?”

Just because they’re hiding _less_ that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped. They’ve come into the light, facing the danger of running into the things that they’re scared of. The things that prompted them to hide for quite some time. The things they’re now not purposely running _from._

“I hid all my life,” she says. “The fashion pointers that come with it are so much fun.”

The Doctor releases her wrists and manages a smile.

“Then do this with me. What are you waiting for? Go back out there, come back with something. We’ll both… _hide_ in plain sight _._ ”

It’s like a surrender for Missy, to hear the Doctor using that word. But it’s exactly what they’re doing, or otherwise the Doctor would have gone back to life the only way she can understand it. Why else would she be stuck in Bristol? Why else would she have _allowed_ getting stuck there over time?

Missy hangs the rest of the clothes on the wall.

“Alright, then. I was going to get you all set first, but alright.” She turns around to leave, and through the curtain, she pops back in for a moment to purr through a lopsided grin: “I’ll show you how it’s done, Doctor.”

When she comes back, she finds that the neat pile of discarded clothing has somehow decreased and been turned into an untidy mess. The Doctor stands in a pool of now-wrinkled pieces, but she’s finally dressed in something, and she’s staring at herself in the mirror in the fullest, truest smile Missy has seen in a while.

Missy drops the few hangers she herself has brought on the opposite corner of the changing room and leans on the wall.

“Well, that’s not too bad. Not at all, no.”

“You think?” The Doctor’s adjusting the coat she’s got on now, and Missy can’t help but think to herself that finally, _finally_ , her rainbow is out. And the storm is a little bit over.

Literally, the Doctor has chosen _rainbow._ Small thin stripes on the flaps of her long coat, horizontal thicker lines of rainbow colors on her t-shirt. It’s all blue, the rest of all the outfit is blue. She’s the goddamn sky.

Missy could practically ooze out metaphors right now.

“Definitely, yes,” she says after a beat she hopes is not noticeable. “I was going to get you in some stuff I found, but you could rock that to infinity. You should.”

The Doctor turns around from her own image in the mirror to look at Missy. The light in her eyes is almost enough to make them appear as young as the rest of her does.

“No,” she says. “Show me what you picked. Can’t very well walk in just this for the rest of my life, can I? Normally, I’d buy the same thing twice, but…”

They both laugh, and Missy refrains from making another magician joke, and she shows the Doctor what she’s chosen for her. Because there’s always time to show her what she’s chosen for herself, as a human disguise. As… an expression, perhaps, of that which she shares with humanity these days.

First, a simple white t-shirt and some classical-fit suit pants in blue (not unlike the ones the Doctor had just been wearing), framed by a yellow cardigan and a huge gray coat, its sleeves slightly shorter than the cardigan’s so the yellow will pop out. Missy shows her a yellow beanie she’s picked out, too.

“Thought this might be your color,” she says. “And…” She also hands a long woolen red scarf over to her, “thought you might like this to go with it. Brings back memories, doesn’t it?”

For the both of them. The Doctor takes it all gently into her hands. It’s thicker than her old scarf used to be, but the length is similar enough.

“Yeah,” the Doctor says, looking longingly at it for a moment. “I was never cold in winter.”

“They say this one’s going to be rough.”

“Might as well get ready for it.”

They change out of their clothes into new ones. Missy confirms, to herself in the privacy of her mind, that yellow might just be the Doctor’s color now. And, once Missy’s tried on her new outfits, she twirls for the Doctor like they’re teenagers in the changing room they’re probably hoarding too much.

Missy doesn’t think the Doctor says one _bad_ word about the way she looks in anything she wants to buy. Not one. She wrinkles her nose—adorably—and inspects everything up close, but doesn’t give anything as vulgar as opinions.

When Missy steps into loose jeans and a looser shirt, it’s mayhem.

“But…” It’s _good_ mayhem. Chaos in confusion. Because the Doctor’s rules can’t apply and without rules, the Doctor gets lost. “They’ll make more jokes. I’ll be out of a _Friends_ episode, all in big coats and beanies, and you’ll be—you’ll be—”

“Oh, relax. This is not for the school, although I’d still be better dressed than some of the people I’ve seen there…”

“You’re retiring the nanny outfit?”

“It’s not a _na_ —” Missy tries to remember that she’s gotten to make magician jokes for too long, and forces herself to not give in to the urge to fight back. “I look like the woman in black, if the woman in black wore purple and a hat. And to be honest, it’s been a while since my first objective in life was to haunt university students like a ghost.”

She changes, then, into the only other outfit she plans to show the Doctor. The third she’s chosen is to be a surprise. This one is what she _will_ be wearing at the school, something that says respectable but at a distance, because up close she will be fierce and magnetic, and honestly a little bit too everything to handle without care.

Sleeveless t-shirt with a dark golden texture and lighter golden linings that remind her of the rings around so many planets. Leather pants. And a jacket that’s not tweed and could very well pass for it.

Respectable college professor. She will be that, if she needs to be. She has been the master of disguise and can play the role so well that a little bit of _Missy-ness_ will constantly slip through without anyone even noticing.

The Doctor sees the leather pants on her and opens her eyes as wide as they go, so, of course, Missy tugs the top upwards a little bit to show them off more.

“I’m trying to second-guess what they’ll say about us now,” the Doctor says.

Missy laughs. Of course, the Doctor is so many steps ahead all the time, it’s hard to catch her in the moment. It’s impossible to catch her in the _same_ moment. But Missy knows that very well, and she actually enjoys it. The fact that they’ve built something as ancient and delicate as this friendship means more to her that moments to be in or not. But, oh, she misses the _game_ she can make of them, even if it’s a solitary one.

Sometimes, it catches them both off-guard, she thinks. A moment between the one Missy exists in and the one the Doctor has jumped off to.

And that, she thinks, is one of the many pillars of their relationship.

“You’ll be rainbow, I’ll be either scary or sexy space lady.”

“Rainbow’s good. Rainbows means transformation, passage of light through prisms. That’s important in what they’re studying. I could use that.”

_Always a step ahead, sometimes more_. Missy laughs softly. _And isn’t it lovely?_

“All professors get a nickname, in the end,” she says. “I’m very much supportive of ‘scary and/or sexy space lady’. Although I‘d really wish they’d add _time_ somewhere in there. It’s just not the same without it.”

Satisfied with their prospective shopping, they finally exit the changing room, lugging excessive amounts of clothing in their arms, because the Doctor insists they will not leave behind what they aren’t buying for someone else to tidy up. This means that, for the most part, the Doctor folds and returns clothes to where she first found them, and Missy takes the prospective shopping to the counter.

When they’re finally together in the queue, only one person is in front of them.

“Took you long enough,” Missy says to the Doctor.

“I was watching one of the shop assistants do the fold until I learned it well enough to replicate it.”

“You have more skills than a Swedish knife has functions, honestly.”

The Doctor giggles to herself. “Yes, I do.”

In that moment, when Missy is about to make a crass joke that she’s probably not in the best place to make, the person in front of them finishes paying for their purchase, and a nice twenty-something woman behind the counter smiles at both of them.

“Hello!” the Doctor says.

“Hello, how can I—”

The woman eyes them curiously for a moment, lost in a quick thought. Missy suddenly remembers that because they can’t buy clothes and wear them at the same time, they’re basically still _the magician and the Victorian nanny._

The previous costumer closes the door with a thud and the three of them are alone in the shop. The other assistant must have gone in the back for something.

Missy dunks all their clothes onto the counter.

“Something wrong, dear?”

The woman begins scanning everything slowly, still looking at them as if for some reason she couldn’t place them.

“Not at all,” she says, not letting the smile die down on her lips. “And how will you be paying today?”

Missy struggles for a moment until she gets a couple of obviously blank and somewhat wrinkly pieces of paper from her pocket.

The Doctor immediately tries to make a coherent point, but all that comes out is noises that resemble ‘but that’s psychic paper, not morphable money!’

Missy leans in to her a little to muster into her non-pierced ear: “Bit of both, love. Best of both worlds.”

Then, she fans herself with the pieces of paper and grins widely at the woman at the counter, who finishes scanning everything.

She tells them the final price, and takes Missy’s so-called morphable money, to give them back a few pounds that apparently didn’t make it into the paper’s perfect calculations because of the bills’ numeration.

“There you go,” the woman says, handing it to them at the same time as their bags. “Have a nice evening! We hope to be seeing you again soon!”

“Thank you!” the Doctor says as they’re both pulling away from the counter.

Missy stares at the actual bits of real money.

“Sticky…” she mutters on her way out of the shop.

She’s almost by the door when she realizes she’s lost the Doctor by the bags area. Rolling her eyes, Missy almost stomps over there. The Doctor’s browsing quickly past glittering small bags, shiny things that don’t really match with her current vibes, until she finds what she spotted all the way across the shop. A fanny pack.

_A bloody fanny pack._

In the Doctor’s defense, Missy has to admit _that_ fits her vibe perfectly.

“We just paid,” she complains. “Now you want to go through the queue again?”

The Doctor’s head immediately shoots back at the counter.

“Queue? What queue? It’s just us!”

“Please don’t get a _fanny_ pack.” Missy feigns fainting. “Anything but a fanny pack, Doctor.”

The Doctor laughs merrily.

“And please don’t laugh at ‘fanny’.”

“You want to as well. Don’t lie. I can see it in your eyebrows.”

“I most certainly do not. I am a respectable Time Lord. I do not laugh at—” Missy’s façade crumbles like cookies against kitchen tile. She splotches the air with her laughter. “We used to be serious, you and I…” she says, eyes watering up a little, chest welling up. She feels fuller inside than she has in a while. “We used to converse about _important_ things. _Fanny pack,_ I swear. I used to conquer civilizations and run amok.”

The Doctor could very well return them both to the state they were in not that long ago, standing in quiet gardens and considering death. Other people’s. But no, she’s putting the bloody fanny pack around herself. And Missy’s not even sure either of them qualify as respectable anymore by how _hard_ they’re both trying not to laugh _harder._

Rassilon, President, destroyer, has probably not laughed or smiled once in joy. And yet here they are, rebels of Gallifrey, in a human shop after dark under artificial, sweet light.

When that light begins to flicker intermittently, they almost don’t stop laughing. It happens often enough in places as human as this. Electricity is faulty and people don’t bother to fix it when they should. Why worry?

But then the light is swallowed entirely by something else, after what feels like a struggle. And the shop disappears. Another space emerges, bathed in bluish hues and in the echo of dripping water droplets.

The woman from the counter stares at them, a few feet away.

“What… did _just_ happen?” she asks.

Missy presses the bags of clothes she just bought against her chest as her parasol dangles from her wrist, and the Doctor holds the unpaid-for fanny pack in her hands, unsure of what to do with it.

“That,” the Doctor says, “is a very good question.” Out of her very magician-looking coat, she gets out her sonic screwdriver. “Let me get back to you.”

“Unless there’s something in the air except for… _moisture—_ ” Missy wrinkles her face in an unpleasant grimace. “—I don’t think using that as a sonar will tell us much.”

The Doctor finishes quickly beeping at said moisturized air.

“It’s alien,” she confirms.

The woman from the shop gapes at the two of them. “What? I’m… sorry? Did you just say ‘alien’? As in… extraterrestrial?” she says. “Like the movie? _Alien_?”

“What’s your name, dear?” Missy says.

The woman stares at her, distrustful for a moment.

“Bill,” she says. “Bill Potts.”

“Right. Well, this is very simple. Simpler than it seems, actually,” Missy says. She rolls her eyes minimally when the Doctor, behind the two of them, has begun beeping at the air and columns and general space once more, trying to pinpoint ‘alien’ a little more. “I’m Missy, short for Mistress—long story, don’t ask. And my nutty, nutty friend over there’s the Doctor, short for nothing. Longer story. _We_ are aliens, so… long story short: aliens are real, _this_ is probably an alien lair…” Missy drags on the sentence, casually leaning towards the Doctor, looking for confirmation.

“Probably. I’m thinking yes. Or, rather, not structurally alien but infested by people that aren’t Earthian folk.”

“And someone or something somehow has teleported us here.”

The Doctor looks up from the ground at Bill. “We don’t know how.”

“But this is empty,” Bill says, turning around a bit towards the many open corridors framed by thick concrete columns. “Of people _and_ things, both.”

“You’re surprisingly okay with the alien thing,” Missy says, amused.

“You don’t seem to have weird tentacles or any other… weird stuff,” Bill says. “That’s reassuring.”

“Maybe they’re hidden.” Missy wiggles her eyebrows at her.

Bill just wiggles hers back.

The Doctor rises from the floor, dusting at her knees.

“There’s traces of quite a few intelligent species,” she says, “but they’re all jumbled together on the floor, like someone had stepped on the same spot to confuse any readings. So I’ve no way to tell who inhabits this place.”

“Or if it’s used as a torture chamber for multiple intelligent species.”

“Thank you, Missy,” the Doctor says sarcastically.

Bill gets to thinking.

“Still, there’s no way out, right? Whatever this place is used for, or whoever’s out there in the shadows of it, we’re trapped here. Essentially.”

“Essentially,” Missy agrees.

“So we’re still going to have to go out there and… find ourselves some way back. Or stand here and wait for those many intelligent species to show up,” she says. “And trust they’re as nice as you two.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Missy adds quickly.

The Doctor’s face has become, in the span of those few sentences, the storm Missy tried for so long to untangle back to just morning clouds.

The silliness disappears and the Time Lord fully returns to her bones, to her hearts and the losses they have been put through. She no longer stands like she needs moving, she’s a statue, hard and cold.

But Bill Potts has just met them both. She could not see the difference or understand it. And it’s so much better this way.

“Why not?” Bill asks. Her first two aliens are two rebels to their race, one of which rebelled from herself as well. Bill doesn’t know. She should never know. “There’s bound to be a way out or something. Nothing’s impenetrable.”

Missy clears her throat.

“We could venture out just for a little bit,” she says, tentatively.

Some time has to be the first. And now they have no more options besides staying put and waiting for the monsters to come to them.

“Just around this area,” she adds.

“Absolutely, yeah,” Bill agrees. “Because if I go off too far, you can count on me getting lost.”

She laughs, because it’s a joke, because she knows she is _not_ going far enough she might get lost, but still… it’s the wrong thing to say right now.

Missy tenses in response.

The Doctor, however, just takes a deep breath and forces herself to smile.

“Alright. Take a corridor each and _don’t_ deviate from it no matter what,” she says. “Look for anything weird, scream and run if anything happens, meet back here in ten minutes. D’you have a phone on you, Bill?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Set a timer.”

They each take a different corridor. Bill goes forwards. The Doctor takes the opposite one to Missy’s. Into the darkness, the air smells humid and somehow… as blueish as it looks.

Their footsteps echo into each other’s ears even if they’re walking away from the point where they started, further away with each new step.

It’s all just corridors, interlacing with corridors. Columns open up new ones in every labyrinthic direction. Anyone would get lost here without a sense of where they were going, without a light or a sonic screwdriver. And none of them have all three.

Bill, although with a nagging feeling that she must be crazy to be walking on without knowing how to get back, trusts herself and her phone light. She is happy she remembered to charge it in the shop. Otherwise, the trip back home on the bus is music-less and a bore. Today’s might be music-less as well, but at least she will find herself here in this alien lair.

Her heart pounds with excitement every time she thinks the word ‘alien’, and she tries to do it every couple of minutes, just to remind herself.

And to think the day started out with an ordinary text from the landlady…

She turns around after a while, just to check something. The back of the corridor is entirely in the dark now. She can’t see where she came from, she just knows it’s in a straight line back from where she’s going.

That’s easy enough. If she doesn’t turn any corners, and she’s not planning to, walking straight towards the blue light at the end of the corridor is fairly easy.

Although, the closer her footsteps take her there, the less sure Bill is it’s a light. It’s more like… light through thin smoke. Or fog. As if the ceiling was breathing it out.

Perhaps she should be scared. After all, if those two back there are telling the truth, anything could happen. _Anything._ She told Heather this morning about ‘anything’, but she was expecting the sort of anything that one normally can foresee in the morning. Free coffee because the girl in the coffeeshop likes you. A quick bus on the way home. The landlady realizing she’s being absurdly rude again. Not aliens from outer space beaming her into their lair.

Bill has seen enough movies to know she _should_ be afraid. But she has been living in tiny apartments, paying rent too early and cutting down on things that made her happy to pay it, for too long. She’s been dreaming of adventures and every second of this one is a second she’s not bagging clothes and typing credit card info.

She almost rejoices in the echo of her moving through the alien lair, empty everywhere she looks. And when she finally makes it to somewhere that is not all corridor anymore, she almost turns around to share the moment with someone who’s not there.

She considers shouting in case either Missy or the Doctor are around, but she doesn’t think they might be. This place is too big. Maybe they’ve all wandered out too long. But the timer still hasn’t gone off.

In the center of many, many corridors, the blueish fog dances still in the air, humid and sticky. It doesn’t smell bad, and when Bill reaches out with a finger to touch it, it doesn’t endlessly corrode through her skin, so she figures it’s safe enough to walk through.

She has to, if she wants access to the rest. To the many boxes piled up on the floor, strange markings on the side of them that faces the center of the room.

At first, she can’t help but imagine that they must be all the same, or at least similar enough to be part of the same language, but the closer she looks, the more boxes she inspects, the less she agrees with that idea.

On a closer look, there’s several alphabets that mark the boxes. And Bill would bet something that this means that there’s not just one alien species behind it.

She should go back and find the others now. This feels important enough to share with the group. Maybe either of them know the language, if they’re aliens themselves.

“Come on,” she tells herself in a half-hearted whisper. “Go on, you. Go back and… tell them what you saw.”

Her eyes have fixated on a box that is only a few inches below her eye level. Most of them are much closer to the floor, piled only on one or two others. But this one… it feels as if it was calling to her.

The timer goes off in her very hand, startling her into taking a few steps back. She switches it off at once.

There’s still no one around, and everything around her is quiet. Nobody has heard. What harm will it do if she just tries this one box? It’s probably not even going to _open,_ is it? Aliens must have sophisticated and invisible locks that will keep it from opening. What’s the harm in trying, just once, to see if it will?

Carefully, she reaches out for the lid. And she finds that it offers no resistance when she pulls it up to reveal its content.

It’s nothing impressive, a small wrist gauntlet with buttons on it and some metal padding besides a leather-like binding to protect the wearer from it. It looks technological, alien, and most of all, turned off.

* * *

Nothing is more disturbing for Missy than the lack of clues. Everywhere else she’s been there was something to interpret, to link to something else. Here, everything’s empty, and leaking, and she keeps getting strange readings on every surface that don’t make sense.

And now this storage room that connects with all the other many awfully too many corridors, but it’s a room with empty boxes, labelled in languages that Missy cannot understand or identify, although she’s sure there’s at least five or six of them, if she’s counted right. She’d need to study them in more detail to figure out if some are dialects.

Why in the hell would you label discarded boxes? Why not burn them or at least burn off the labelling to label them again? Especially when some have been clearly and simply just been thrown to never get picked up again.

“See?” she says to herself. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

Trash is trash. Why keep it? Unless these sods have some sort of inability to get rid of it. It all depends on where they are, and Missy cannot know where they are without windows or traces of organic matter. It’s all too made of concrete. And most planets have concrete, it’s easy construction material to get by on. Even Skaro has it.

What she wonders is where they’re keeping what was previously kept inside these boxes. And what that is. Perhaps it’s dangerous and it damages the chemical composition of the box, and so they need to let them sit here for a while in humid air before they’re burned or recycled.

Missy doesn’t like the sound of that.

Then, making her stand quickly to her feet, she hears another sound she likes even less.

* * *

Locked boxes in an empty warehouse.

The situation already whispered the word ‘trap’ to the Doctor the second she walked in and tried to open one. Maybe she should have tried the sonic, and she would have, if curiosity had gotten the better of her, even while knowing it would have triggered some alarms inside the building. These days, safety always does get the better of her first, a whole long while before anything else can.

They shouldn’t have gotten separated. An innocent person is in on this. Alone, wandering around these corridors. And who knows what is hiding in the shadows? Who knows who is hiding and what they are hiding under locks that cannot even be seen?

Under these voices that tease so faintly she thought at first she was imagining them. But she isn’t. She wishes she had the TARDIS in situ to translate.

She leaves the boxes and follows the voices around in circles, trying to locate a source that seems to change location as she does.

And then, quite suddenly, words she understands make her stop. Quite suddenly, in a barely audible whisper, it just makes her stop.

_…we will get it back…_

She doesn’t need to know that ‘by force, if necessary’ is implied.

She runs back into the corridors, shouting for her companions at the top of her lungs. The sonic amplifies her voice. It carries into every corridor. It must reach the others before anything else can.

“Find your way back now!”

But… to be completely honest with herself, _where_ is back? They began at no intersection between corridors, and there is no TARDIS to mark a meeting point.

‘Back’ might as well mean ‘move’. She might as well have yelled at them to do that instead.

“Run somewhere that’s… not where you are!”

She begins to hear rapid footsteps on the metal floors and that is when she stops running herself. She has no way to know if they’re the ones she called to her or not. And she has no hope left in her.

“Doctor?”

“Ah! Finally!” she says as Missy almost runs into her.

That very second, Bill, in her hurried sprinting, almost passes them by to crash against a column.

“What’s going on? What’s happening with the voices?”

_…give it back…_

“Never mind the voices, what’s happening with the _boxes_?” Missy says. “All empty and … out there.”

The Doctor stands up straighter, then she leans a little towards Missy’s side.

“Yours were empty?”

“Mine weren’t empty,” Bill says. “And… the voices. They were saying different things. Not… that about getting whatever it was back. I heard something else. Something about… I don’t know. Robbery?”

“Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Come on, no!” The Doctor groans to herself for a second. When her eyes return to the other two, it’s hard to watch her. It’s hard to stand there as she loses bits of what used to keep her together. Her eyes are hard, lines forming around them. “Did any of you _touch_ anything? Even if it was just for a moment. Did you _take_ anything or—or … did you move a box or—?”

“How could I? I got empty boxes…” Missy says.

Bill stands quietly by them. She isn’t too sure what is supposed to be happening. Despite the novelty, even she has noticed the Doctor’s worry. And the doubt of whether or not she might make it worse with what she knows…

“I only opened a lid. Just to look at what was inside,” she says, then quickly adds, when the other two stare at her, eyes wide open. “Some sort of… machine, I think.”

“That might have registered as something breaching security protocols,” the Doctor says. She looks about ready to pull at her own hair in frustration. “The voices might be a warning, before something worse comes along. I don’t know. Maybe it’s already coming.”

“Okay,” Bill says. She doesn’t look as scared as she should be in these circumstances. “Then what do we do? If… aliens show up, do we try to explain?”

Missy shakes her head at them both.

“If they have security protocols on _unlocked_ lids,” she says, “they’re not going to ask us questions first.”

“So we run, yeah?”

“Where?” the Doctor says. “Nowhere to go except somewhere we might be more trapped in.”

Those words sound so new and fragile in her, Missy tries to pretend they have just been said in general, because they’re true.

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she says. “Why did they get us here? How did they do it? And, most importantly, how are we getting _out_? Maybe we should let them catch us.”

“Great,” Bill says to no one in particular. “I get one adventure out of town and it just happens to be one I can’t even escape from.”

“Unless—” Missy says, cocking her head a little. She turns to the other two. “We could sonic the alarm off.”

The Doctor eyes her warningly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Missy complains. “It could work.”

“It’s a risk, going back. Stay back here with Bill, I’ll do it.”

“And if someone comes? They will swamp you,” Bill says. “No, three against whomever makes for much better odds. We’re coming with you.”

Missy can’t help a half-hearted grin at the Doctor.

“Kid’s got spirit. And she’s right, too.” Her eyes meet the Doctor’s. It’s neither the time nor the place for anything beyond a few words that cover the essentials, but Missy does hope the Doctor _gets_ what awaits beneath them. “We’ve got your back.”

“Fine,” the Doctor grumbles, “but we’re being careful. Walk behind me…”

Missy doesn’t bother reminding her that even though she’s carrying bags and a parasol, she could still summon old decades of lethalness if pressed to.

As they try to find the way back to the part of the warehouse Bill discovered first, the voices keep on whispering. Mostly, it’s the same message over and over again, about returning something stolen. But sometimes, as the Doctor’s eye watches every dark corner and every inch of the blue fog that clouds it all, she thinks she can hear something familiar in the voices.

It’s a much faster walk with company, while they’re running from something they can’t really see but that doesn’t fail to turn their stomachs.

When they get to the room filled with the many unlocked boxes, perfectly piled on one another, Bill points at the one she opened.

The Doctor wastes no time in approaching it with her sonic.

“Wait. Wait, wait, waaaait,” Missy says, stopping her. “Let’s take a look at it first.” She quickly takes off the lid and sing-songs: “Vortex manipulator. Old as time itself.”

“Is it working? I thought it wasn’t working,” Bill says.

“Nope,” Missy says. “But who said that was a problem?”

She smirks as she goes grab it.

“What are you doing?” the Doctor tells her. Her eyebrows are coming together on her forehead. It’s terrifying since this is not the face _with_ the eyebrows. “You can’t just—”

“Oh, come on,” Missy says, throwing her hands back at her sides, almost floppily. The bags bump awkwardly against her legs as she does. “They already think we took something. We might as well take it for real.”

Bill smiles, nodding along with her head.

“You can take us home with that thing, can’t you? Like in Star Trek or something.”

“Cheaper, nastier transport than in Star Trek, but yes,” Missy says.

_…we will get it back…_

The three of them fall quiet for a moment. This time it’s sounded closer, for a second. Missy doesn’t wait for permission, she doesn’t need it. In the time it takes her to hold the vortex manipulator in her hands, she’s already dumping all the bags—and parasol—onto the Doctor, so she can observe it well before doing anything.

She has to open a few more boxes, in search for some pieces, but at this point it doesn’t matter much to either of them. They all just want to get back home as fast as Missy can take them. The threat of what _can_ happen until she does is too much for some of them.

After she’s done, Missy spends some time frowning at the buttons on the vortex manipulator.

“It’s jammed,” she groans. “Won’t let me… go to the year we want to go. Like 2020’s been banned from cheap time travel.”

“What the hell happens in 2020?” Bill asks, laughing.

The Doctor shrugs. “I don’t know. The year’s not over yet when I was living it. Anything _can_ still happen.” She watches Bill for a second as Missy fights the buttons a bit longer. “You’re taking this so… _well!_ People normally spend a bit longer coming to terms with… all of this stuff.”

For lack of a better word.

“Alien was a discovery, the answer to a question,” Bill says. “This is just expanding the answer.” She scratches at the back of her neck. “Time travel… Spaceships, probably. Entire fleets out there. And planets made of, I don’t know, kryptonite?”

“There _is_ a planet known for a town where everyone’s a fan of Superman. They even have green glass-like cliffs, and red-and-blue food, and commemorative statues. But they’re all normal aliens. Not, you know, Superman-adjacent.”

“Will you two stop it with the fangirling?” Missy says. “This bloody old thing won’t take us to 2020.”

Bill bites her lip.

“Well, that’s not good.” She leans closer to Missy. “Can you do anything about that? I’ve a shift to finish. And a—well, a girlfriend at home waiting for me.”

“That’s quite lovely, dear. But I’m going to say… no. It doesn’t currently look like I can.”

The Doctor, buried a bit under the big bags of clothes, approaches the two of them to say to Missy:

“Then try another year. Preferably within the 2010s, if you can,” she tells Missy. “We’ll improvise from there.”

“Don’t you love how your plans always involve this much improvisation?” Missy whispers distractedly as she gets to work. She knows _exactly_ what the Doctor means by improvising, now.

“I still have to call them plans in front of other people…”

Missy presses a few buttons and, while the Doctor sneakily watches over her shoulder, finally exclaims in joy and relief.

“Alright, gals and non-binary pals,” she says, “grab my arm, hand, or any other appendages.”

They huddle together around Missy, the Doctor holding on to her left arm, and Bill on to her right, and in the next blink of a second, the vortex manipulator takes them away—

—to a London covered in trees.

“Woah…” Bill says. “I remember this. It was the most terrifying few hours of my life at the time. Like a collective bad dream.”

“Come on,” the Doctor says. “There’s somewhere in here we can go.”

They move fast through the foliage. She listens carefully as they do, watching out for familiar memories pouring out of the forest. She’s not sure when the old Doctor will come back to these parts of green London. She’s not even sure they got the time right, but this is the biggest window she could remember in which she didn’t depend on a time machine.

When it finally appears, those blue colors through the greenery, she begins running. How she’s missed it. She hadn’t even thought of it all these months, despite living inside it at the time. She hadn’t stopped to remember the fact that the TARDIS has always been the only thing that can get her away.

“Come on.” She turns around to call the other two. “There’s not much time!”

Bill almost stops running when she sees it, a police box in the middle of the forest, standing mightily and silently as if it belonged but knew everybody else could see it didn’t. Powerful even without motion or words.

“Is that…?”

“Oh, yeah,” Missy says, patting her in the arm as she walks towards it.

Missy holds the door open for her, lets her in first. Because the moment only happens once for each person, and it has truly been a long time since the last moment happened to the Doctor.

She’s retreated into the old console, already pushing numbers where she has to, head hanging low. But Missy knows she’s paying attention to Bill’s first steps into the echo of the TARDIS.

“This is…” Bill says. “ _Some_ how bigger on the inside.”

“What were you imagining? A tiny time traveling police box?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Bill mutters, mostly to herself, as she looks all around. “Three people would’ve fit in there. Cozily…”

No amount of science-fiction or action movies could ever prepare anyone for this. Space bending to create something as extraordinary as the energy it emanated from the outside. Royal, in a way, and quietly accepting all opinions, because it stands taller than any of them. Bill breathes in the air that exists in this room that is so much more than that and knows, without asking, that something sentient exists within machine and engine.

The Doctor grants her a tiny grin before she pulls the final lever, saying:

“Well, I hope the Doctor doesn’t notice she’s gone…”

Bill joins the other two by the console. She can feel the humming everywhere, the soul of the TARDIS, nameless and beating, almost like the two hearts of the Time Lord who stole it.

“Aren’t _you_ the Doctor?” Bill asks, curious.

“I was the Doctor, too, when I flew this in real time,” the Doctor says. “My ship’s at home in Bristol. Back then, now, _this_ version of my ship is in London.”

Bill grabs some of the yellow notebooks laying around in one corner of the console room.

“Hah! I used to do homework on notepads just like these.”

She flips through one absent-mindedly.

“Ooooooh! Ms. Oswald? Clara Oswald?” Bill says excitedly. “She used to be my teacher in high school. I wonder how she’s doing. She used to be so sweet.”

It is like the air has been sucked out of the room, motion frozen in an instant. Bill has no idea what she has just said. And younger Bill, years ago, probably didn’t either. To some, it’s been months. To some, the end of puberty and the beginning of adulthood. Time in a loop, time setting rules.

Thankfully, the TARDIS takes off then, drowning the many things that could be said. When did Clara disappear off the face of the earth? Did she happen to fade away from memories at a time when school was ending, when everyone could simply pretend she’d gone on vacation early and then just never returned?

The Doctor’s hands shake on the controls.

When they land, they do so outside the very street where the shop in which Bill works is. It’s as dark as when they left. She’s almost the first one out, to open the doors for Bill to see. How many times she has done this very bit, with people who awed at the sight of time and space travel. And now all she cares about is to get them _home_ safe. Without them asking more questions, without them wanting more that could get them in danger.

“Now, that’s something…” Bill says. “My girlfriend Heather would never believe me even if I showed her.”

“Some people never do,” Missy says.

The Doctor gets the fanny pack from the floor and hands it over to Bill.

“Didn’t have time to pay for this,” she says. “Will you be in any trouble if you walk in and take it back?”

“Not much. It’s empty now. We were the only ones in there when… the thingy happened. And my colleague Karen, in the back, _actually_ nicks stuff out sometimes, so…”

The Doctor watches her for a moment.

“Stay safe, Bill Potts,” she says. “And if you notice anything weird again…”

She leaves it inconclusive, but Bill actually grins.

“Yeah,” she says, “I’ll look out for a big blue box. Thanks.”

She leaves, and as she does, she takes one final look back at the inside of a box that’s bigger than the outside. The most wonderful paradox, the most amazing piece of dimensional engineering. But her eyes fixate on the two people standing yet in it, and she is hit with a wave of recognition, with the pieces of knowledge that have been scattered in her mind all night long.

_That’s right! They’re the costume people Heather and I saw at uni this morning! Figures…_

She closes the door behind her, and the Doctor pulls down the lever again.

“Do you want to fly it back or shall I?” Missy asks, lounging on the TARDIS stairs.

“I’ll do it,” the Doctor says, her voice too low. She is struggling not to look at the yellow notebooks, struggling not to put a note in there that will warn Clara and herself in the past of the future she’s already survived. “Remember that by the time of the forest, I wasn’t very far from knowing your face for the first time.”

They emerge in the Doctor’s own office, where another TARDIS, newer only on the outside, awaits. Missy leaves it this time, she watches the Doctor take off in her own borrowed TARDIS to return it to the forest, where another Doctor and another companion need it to shelter children and their two teachers from solar flares. With a sigh, as the ship dematerializes, Missy gets into the Doctor’s new TARDIS and goes after her, to pick her up in that forest before anyone notices. To take her back home safe.

* * *

Nobody pays attention to the lights being on in the office at night. Normally, as per their plans, they would have gone up there in the afternoon, after classes, and stayed well past office hours until the building closed. Tonight they land in the middle of it, before they can even see it properly, and Missy only ever turns on the lights to cross the office and get into her own TARDIS so she can dump every new piece of clothing she’s bought there.

One entire summer went by and she managed to steer clear of mentions of Clara Oswald. One single day, not even a full day, and the Doctor flies straight into someone who knew her before Gallifrey sucked her away from Earth.

This planet is designed to be a miserable experience. Missy cannot even understand why she once spent years trying to turn it into one. Didn’t she realize it already was?

_Stupid question, really_ , she tells herself now, opening the door to the Doctor’s TARDIS. _It never was about coherence._

It was about drowning out pain and noise by being loud and hurting others. A failsafe plan, truly. The noise was gone a long time ago, but her pain is as infinite as she has potential to be.

And now she keeps dreaming of ways to channel it.

She lives on the very Earth she once dreamed of destroying to fuel human suffering and hide her own, with a version of the Doctor she never thought she would ever meet, and a nagging feeling in her ribcage, heavier than two hearts, that all which is wrong now will never be right.

Missy stays by the TARDIS’s entrance when she notices the Doctor alone inside, leaning on the console. She’s picked up a guitar from somewhere, probably the many means of storage below, and has begun plucking notes out of it. Notes that make the silence between them vibrate.

It’s just chords at first, but the Doctor’s tentative fingers eventually arrive at a stable melody. She repeats it in a loop, led by muscle memory rather than a conscious intent to play anything. And then… her hands become quiet next to the strings and the firm wood.

There was once a woman who sat by this very console, legs crossed, and smirked at her, saying, _thank god, Doctor, I thought you only knew rock songs!_ And so the Doctor, to prove a point at the time, had complied and sang her this song.

Now, when her voice begins singing the very first verse _,_ it trembles softly at the memory of those big brown eyes, drinking in every moment with a love that few people have ever professed her.

_This old guitar taught me to sing a love song_

_Taught me how to laugh and how to cry_

_It introduced me to some friends of mine and it brightened up some days_

_And helped me make it through some lonely nights_

_What a friend to have on a cold and lonely night_

She sings it so gently, as if afraid to wake up a baby sleeping in the same room, that at first Missy only ever hears the music and can’t really tell the words apart.

_This old guitar gave me my lovely lady_

_Opened up her eyes and ears to me_

_It brought us close together, but I guess it broke her heart_

_And opened up the space for us to be_

The Doctor closes her eyes. A few tears stream down her face in the space between verses. Even if her fingers are shaking slightly and the story is history, not myth, she takes a deep shattering breath and goes on singing.

Missy’s hearts hurt just from watching her. She knows she’s watching something precious. The catharsis of a summer in a song.

_This old guitar gives me my life and my living_

_You know everything I love to do_

_To serenade those stars that shine from a sunny mountain side_

_But most of all to sing my songs for you_

_Yes, I do, you know_

_I love to sing my songs for you_

Once it’s over, it begins again, anew, a lullaby for the pain. Missy stays in the console room long enough to hear the song a few times; it becomes quieter as minutes go by, and when the last chord fades into the echoing hum of the TARDIS, Missy puts a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder and squeezes it lightly.

“I think I’m going to go work on my matrix for a little while,” Missy tells her softly. “Don’t wait up for me. Try and get some sleep, will you?”

She has to at least say that, even if neither of them has really slept in months. They keep trying from time to time, they keep coaxing the other to.

“Yeah, okay,” the Doctor replies. Her fingers strum another short melody on the guitar.

Missy leaves before she can recognize it, and in some way it’s better off like this.

Once inside her own TARDIS, she changes into that new shirt and jeans she bought, and sits on the floor with the pieces of her old matrix, bits of time-and-space travel devices she has been picking up from here and there.

Even impossible technology can be understood, replicated. She has an almost exact duplicate of the TARDIS that put Gallifrey in an impenetrable bubble. It doesn’t matter how long it takes her, there has to be a way, somewhere in this other TARDIS, in her own Time Lord mind, to penetrate it from the outside. And a summer clearly hasn’t been long enough.

Thirteen Doctors and thirteen TARDISes trapped Gallifrey. Thirteen forces at once.

Missy knows by now she may need to somehow find a way to amplify the speed at which the ship travels through the vortex by thirteen. But only at the very last minute, only to traverse the bubble, only to land. It’s the only lead she has found.

And all she has at her disposal is a dead memory matrix, teleports, and time.

Time…

She is sprawled on the cold metal floors, a few differently sized wrenches strewn around her. All her ideas expired a long while ago, when she still felt the rush of time. Of not having it.

All she wants is to breach that bubble for the Doctor, so they can get Clara back, but Missy hasn’t even told her yet. Because giving her false hope is a recurrent nightmare she has, in which the Doctor’s eyes shine in joy, and Missy gobbles it right up as she chuckles evilly and says, _My, Doctor, did you really think it’d be that easy?_ Now, this is all she can do, silently try to hurry up and rescue Clara from Gallifrey’s impenetrable atmosphere before the Doctor fades into something nameless.

And she’s failing.

Missy begins humming to herself, almost unable to help it, as she leans forward to pick up a wrench.

_You know everything I love to do_

_To serenade those stars that shine from a sunny mountain side_

_But most of all to sing my songs for you_

_Yes, I do, you know_

_I love to sing my songs for you_

Someday, somehow, the work will get done. It has to.

The Doctor needs her to finish it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “In the not-too-distant future” is a nod to X-Men.
> 
> Because it’s not on Spotify, you get a link to [You’re So True](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cIwzJL84QU&ab_channel=atnaloj626), the song that played in my head and in my playlist during the more college-y scenes.
> 
> The song the Doctor plays is _This Old Guitar_ , originally by John Denver, although the version in [the playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nGKBLdSNYNJNZc4tH8TQi) is sung by Micah P. Hinson. I can actually hear Jodie Whittaker’s voice singing if I read the lyrics, her cover of Coldplay’s _Yellow_ made an impact on me.


	6. The Once and Future King

“You didn’t have to _walk_ me…” Bill is saying, swaying her hand and Heather’s in midair between them. They’re sort of clogging the corridor, but it’s not like there’s not a bit of room at either side for people to walk past if they really, really need to.

“I love having this conversation,” Heather says. “It always leads to such sensible conclusions. _You didn’t have to walk me. But I did. But you didn’t have to. But I did._ Talking in circles. We’re sweet, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Bill giggles. “Especially you, because you find everything sweet. Why is that? I mostly want to at least scoff at stuff. You like to look at it long enough to form a nicer opinion.”

“Bill, you don’t _scoff_ at stuff. You smile at it and inwardly hate.” Heather chuckles. “You’re sweet, too. Nobody who isn’t does that. They would just… hate outwardly.”

“Okay, but you really _didn’t_ have to walk me.”

A few of her classmates begin to go inside her classroom. She’s a little bit early, and truth be told, Heather has already walked her there, so she might as well make the most of the few minutes she’s got left before the professor gets there.

“You’re doing it now,” Heather points out.

“I’m not hating!” Bill complains. “This isn’t me hating, this is me… merely suggesting that maybe you’re going to… be late?”

“My professor takes a terrible bus line every morning. I’m fine,” Heather says, leaning in for a kiss. One long kiss that makes Bill’s stomach flutter like last year, when they first met in that pub, walked up to the same spot and faced each other like mirrors of each other. “I like seeing you off. Like we’re in a movie or something.”

“Mmmmm… ’kay,” Bill remembers to say. Heather loves every cheesy genre of movie that can be watched on a Sunday evening on TV, she doesn’t even mind much that they mostly only feature straight couples with the personality of a boulder. She says she likes the _feel_ of it, not the concreteness. “Then can I pick you up later? For lunch? We’ll be even more in a movie.”

“Yeah, alright.”

The clock bell tolls, then, breaking them apart into separate parts of the building.

“See ya,” Bill says to her, as Heather grins and walks away.

Bill can’t help to wish for a few moments more, but Heather is always perfectly content with reality, hopping along on her way, knowing they’ll meet each other in a bit. Sometimes Bill gets the feeling that Heather likes the progression of _every_ thing too much.

Bill hasn’t heard her whine once about going to work, even for double shifts. Or about anything related to the university. Heather just… seems to like the ordinary aspects of everything that are to be expected. She only ever complains when it’s time to pay the landlady, or when people and things run late—when the unexpected disrupts her plan.

And Bill never finds the right time to tell her, especially these days, how much she would like to skip most of that perfect planification society enforces so that she can find something else, something more meaningful, to fill all that time that they’re not spending together.

She finds a little seat in the back of the classroom and dumps all her stuff on the table next to it. A few people sit here sometimes, so she tries to keep an eye on the door in case some of them come in, but it’s late enough. The next one to arrive those doors through will probably be the professor.

And—

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he comes in saying. “Dead squirrel on the way, big crowds watching.”

In a few minutes, as he’s dropped his own textbook on his desk and begun talking about the weekend as a prelude for the lecture, latecomers arrive. It is always the same. Bill has been a latecomer often enough to know the door should always stay open so that nobody actually interrupts with knocking and permission-asking.

By the time the professor actually starts the lecture, a few good minutes have passed, and Bill has entered the realm inside her head where a part of it is listening and another part is thinking about Heather.

It’s a real pity that this year they have no classes together, it was fun to try and guess if there was something there at the beginning, when Heather kept looking at her and Bill kept looking at _her_ and none of them actually did anything about it.

_I still can’t believe she noticed me,_ Bill thinks to herself now.

“…and what this tells us is that, without a single doubt, in every last conclusion that has been reached in the past decade…” the professor drones on.

_I can’t believe we’re living together,_ Bill thinks back to herself, almost laughing in her head.

Normally, the way things go is you notice one another, you maybe find a way to flirt that works for both of you, you turn the flirting up a notch so that it leads to more (definition of ‘more’ pending), and then stretch out the limits to whatever’s comfortable. People usually leave it at smooching on clubs, sex, and partying, especially during the college years.

Bill and Heather smooched on a club once, had a disastrous first date the next day once the club experience had returned to a more ‘normal’ experience, and then they’d sat on a bench for a few hours and talked it out.

There’d been sex, there’d been partying. In quantities they’d both found comfortable.

And somewhere along the summer, in between the normal worrying about ‘where are we? Are we anywhere?’, Heather’s landlord had decided to sell his flat. Heather had needed a place right when Bill’s roommate had just happened to move out.

The rest is history.

There’s always stories about people falling in love in college, but Bill never expected that to happen to her. It’s the sort of thing you hear about and always sort of know, deep down, it’s just going to happen to someone else. If you’re very unlucky, to someone in your vicinity so you can watch.

_I still cannot_ believe _I’m the one she pictures romantic comedies about in her head…_

And, what’s even better, Bill bites her lip at the thought—and the beauty of the thought—that _she_ is the one that willingly creates scenarios out of romantic comedies for Heather to relive in real life.

After all, Heather sits down on the couch with her to watch marathons of sci-fi stuff despite not really liking any of it and finding it rather dull unless there’s tropes with aliens living on Earth. It’s only fair.

“… the probability of any of this happening is, in fact, rather slim when you compare the data that I have shown you, in this slide over here…”

Bill sighs and forces herself to continue paying attention to the voice of the professor, but her eyes stray from his continuous pacing to the open door on her right.

She happens to catch the empty corridor during a second when it most certainly ceases to be.

The quickest running footsteps.

“Oi! Come back here!”

The flash of a coat chasing them.

The Doctor’s coat. Because of course nobody else would be running along those corridors. Just her.

And what on earth would she be chasing after on _campus_? There can’t possibly be aliens on campus, can there?

“…normally, research would suggest otherwise, and yet many opt to develop hypotheses on this very particular subject to quite simply see them fail over the years…”

But, then again, why else would the Doctor be doing that? Bill didn’t catch anybody else dashing past the door.

She taps her foot against the floor in an attempt to focus.

Slides. Data. Research. Yes, the basis for the theory she’s studying now. Very important.

And yet every single sentence that the professor speaks to the class is lost to her the very same second her brain hears it.

_So what’s the point in staying, then?_ She tells herself. _It’s not like you’re making the most of it. Or…_ any _thing of it._

Somewhere nearby she hears the Doctor yelling again. And this time she can’t help it. Bill just grabs her things from the table—she didn’t even have a piece of paper and a pen out to write things down—and quietly makes her exit, never even looking back into the classroom.

“Doctor?” she whispers into the empty corridor.

Somehow, the silence in the building has swallowed every clue again, as if there had never been any at all.

And Bill can’t stand by the door forever—the source of distraction for her own classmates.

She moves away from it, following the corridor slowly, listening for anything, noise or breath. But all that her ears pick up is the sounds of her own body as it walks on.

Even as she makes an effort to breathe softly to try and concentrate better, the silence is thick and overly sweet, misleading. Her heartbeat drips all over it, getting stronger the more she thinks about what can be set loose on campus, the more she imagines it.

As she climbs up the stairs to the next floor, she picks out distant voices coming from inside classrooms where the doors must also have been open. She only ever listens more intently for anything that may seem out of place in all of that mumbling.

Near one of the smallest classrooms on the floor, Bill walks past to see Missy, her voice loud and commanding as she addresses her audience, even in such a cozy space, nothing comparable to the auditorium downstairs.

Bill watches for a moment, then continues walking on. She doesn’t realize, of course, that in keeping the door open to the corridor, Missy’s inundating it with her voice, cloaking everything else and keeping Bill from noticing a nearby tap-tap of footsteps on wood.

“Did you see it? Did you see it run past?” Out of nowhere, the Doctor shows up to almost crash against Bill. “It has to be somewhere around here…” she pants, falling to hands on knees as Bill tries to recover from the shock and a short yell drowned in the Doctor’s words.

“See… what? The alien you’re trying to catch?” Bill says, amused, only ever just slightly, at the fact that the Doctor is trying to be both stealthy and absurdly un-private about her shenanigans at the same time.

Right now, the amount of stealth really tries to notch itself up a bit, to no avail.

“Yes?”

“Didn’t see it, sorry.”

“Where did it go this time? I almost had it…” the Doctor complains, mostly to herself.

“Want some help catching it?” Bill suggests casually. Then she realizes what she just said. “It’s not dangerous, right?”

“I… don’t know. Figuring that out. I’m pretty sure I have never seen it before, but I can’t look at it properly and decide that if I don’t _find_ it first…” She tries to catch her breath quicker than she already was. “But it just… runs so fast!” She throws her hands up. “Every time!”

“So…” Bill tries again. She sways a little on her feet. “Need any help with it? I’m a fast runner. And I used to be really good at hide and seek. In really big spaces, I always get lost and forget where I’ve already looked.”

“Do you go here?”

Bill nods.

“Then you should be in class. And I… should be running.” The Doctor straightens herself up and takes one final deep breath before waddling away again.

Bill stands by Missy’s classroom for a moment, watching her go.

“Shouldn’t you be in class, too?” she asks, a little louder, so her voice will carry.

It’s not a pernicious question, or even to get back at the Doctor for assuming. Bill’s just… turning the attention back to her. Life is already strange enough, there’s two alien professors on this university she has already run from other aliens with once, and now one of them is chasing another alien on campus. Bill’s curious. Why here? Why with her so close to it all? Why put it all right below her nose and not let her whiff it in like an enchanting perfume?

The Doctor’s head hangs forward for a second, her hair bobbing slightly as it does. Then, she turns around. She’s wearing clothes she bought that night, when Bill was whisked away to an alien lair with her and Missy and found out life _was_ strange, but in a delightful way.

“Yeah,” the Doctor says. She’s smiling now, apologetically so. “Yes, I should be.”

Bill smiles back at her.

The Doctor reaches out. She raises her right hand out to Bill, even in the distance between them, even if Bill can’t take it.

“So…” she says. Then, softly, aware of the possible no, aware of risks the yes always hides and may sometimes spring out without warning, she asks: “Run with me?”

And Bill’s smile grows until it covers all of her face.

She joins the Doctor and takes her hand. She nods, then realizes something important.

“Actually,” she says. “We should probably…”

The Doctor slaps her own forehead. “Absolutely. D’you wanna…?” She points at the piece of corridor right in front of them.

Bill waves dismissively.

“Nah, I’ll take the back, you go ahead. Um… what am I looking for, exactly? Within the limits of what you, uh, know.”

“Something small. Probably biped. Not sure about that, but likely so, yes. Very fast, terribly fast. Makes almost no noise until it’s right by you, then no noise again.” The Doctor wrinkles her face, all concentration and questions. “Might make noise if it _wants_ to make noise, also not sure about that bit.”

“Got it.”

She doesn’t ask, although she’s itching to, how the hell something that unknown got through to Earth. Maybe it just stowed itself away in the TARDIS the other way and remained dormant in the corridors or the basements of the university until now. She knows plenty of stories like that. Only the lifeforms in those stories didn’t just run about, they did a little bit more angry interfering.

Again, she focus on the noises. Breathing and voices, and footsteps that are too fast. Somewhere, everywhere. Bipeds can’t normally climb on the ceilings, but she looks up at them anyway, just in case.

Sometimes she thinks she hears it. The tell-tale of little feet. And she runs to match it until it’s as loud as her own heartbeat. Then, it’s lost in the stretch of a staircase, or another corridor. Or, quite simply, in the quiet again. As if it had stopped moving, because it had heard her coming its way.

But once, while lazily strutting about, she thinks she sees a flash of something. No sound to guide her there. Just the one motion, clear in the periphery of her eye. Right by a corner.

She glances at it directly and the corner returns to normal. But she approaches it anyway, treading as gently as she dares on the floors. Any misstep and her position will be given away and the creature, if truly there, will run off.

When she’s right about to turn the corner, she catches one glimpse of it. Enough to gauge its size, but nothing more. It disappears the second she tries to so much as react.

“Wait! No!” One second too late, Bill sets off to a sprint, hitting the corner with her shoulder as she does. “Come back here!”

Such a tiny thing, barely reaching out to her mid-calf, slimy and glossy like a glob of glitter in the sun. It’s going to be hard to trap. It’s already hard enough to _spot._

Bill almost hits herself against another corner. Two steady hands grab her by the shoulders before she even can.

“Bill!”

“Doctor!” she says. “It was right there!”

“Then it must have passed me by. Oh, come on… I’m never going to find it.”

The clock bell signaling the end of a class and the beginning of another tolls. Students exit their classrooms almost at once, synchronized, and the corridor gets filled with people. The Doctor looks at Bill, as if saying _don’t you have another class to go to?_ , and Bill glances back at her, wondering how they are to find the alien in all this crowd now. Any clue they could be said to have had a minute ago is entirely lost.

They try to walk with the multitude along the many corridors, secretly exploring near everything that is on floor and wall alike.

Leaning on the wall outside of a classroom door, Missy in a pair of black sunglasses, a leather jacket, her golden top, and leather pants is staring at them.

“Ms. Potts, was it?”

Bill nods.

“Ms. Potts and the Doctor who was supposed to be in there with me explaining stars to the kids.” She tsks slowly, almost seductively. Her lips are almost redder than ever, compared with the black and dark gold of the rest of her outfit, and the paleness of her face. “I thought we weren’t supposed to _flirt_ our way around!”

Bill blushes more intensely, then, than Missy’s lipstick looks. The Doctor startles and, finding nowhere tall enough to hide behind, makes a feeble attempt at not shielding her face with her hands.

Missy scoffs in amusement.

“So, knowing that’s _definitely_ not the case here, what in the name of stardom _are_ you two doing?” She addresses the Doctor directly now. “Did we get a distress call and I didn’t hear about that?” She makes a puzzled face. “ _Do_ we still get those?”

“Apparently, St. Luke’s got an alien on the loose. A tiny, little thing that can _bloody_ run,” Bill says.

“Well, this explains _someone_ ’s absence from class,” Missy says, eyeing the Doctor conspicuously, who is still trying very hard not to blush, despite herself. “It doesn’t explain why we get an alien and a Bill twice in the same mixing pot. ’Cause that sounds a bit coincidencey to me.”

“I’m human,” Bill immediately replies, throwing her hands up and looking to the Doctor for confirmation.

“It’s not even attacking anyone, but… it’s out there and—” The Doctor forces herself not to mutter too much what she knows is a full confession, “—it bothers me not knowing what it is and how it got here in the first place.”

Missy exaggerates a grin.

“Back at the warehouse, did we know what was out there waiting to attack us but at the moment not doing so?”

Bill and the Doctor remain painfully silent.

“Did we know how it had gotten _us_ up there in the first place?” Missy adds. They shake their heads slowly in synchrony. “And now another alien sneaks into our strangely convoluted existences and… you two run after it like it’s Christmas!”

Bill smiles a little. “Sorry?”

“I just want to figure out what it is…” the Doctor says. And she seems to regain a bit of bodily presence when she stretches fully into the width of her shoulders and adds: “I wouldn’t be doing this if I knew it was dangerous. To anyone.”

After all, they are in a very public place. Missy watches her for a moment, watches her hold a ground that five seconds ago might as well have been lava for how little she seemed to be able to remain still on it. She’s… risen from the depths of herself like a sunken ship, to the rescue of the possibility of someone running into the same striking lightning that sunk hers.

The warehouse and a runaway alien might be connected. It’s too much of a coincidence, but that’s what Missy thinks. They ran from the mystery before solving it the first time, because the Doctor got scared of the danger.

If she’s sure there’s none now, if she’s involving Bill now… Then that should be good, shouldn’t it? The Doctor is standing in front of them like she believes hard enough in what she’s doing.

_It’s just catching one creature,_ Missy tells herself. _And they said it’s tiny._ She clears her throat; it feels a bit itchy, maybe because of her first lesson talking to the whole class on her own. _The Doctor needs this. It’s been too long. She needs this as much as the worlds needs her to come back._ She may really be rising again, like the tide does to fill all that empty space above the dry sand and rock. A hero come from tragedy, rising to one day help quench the needs of a people.

Never traveling alone was always one of the Doctor’s rules. Now she’s not even traveling. She’s not even daring to do what she does best, keeping monstrous plots at bay, saving people, getting to know their cultures. She’s stuck in Bristol with her oldest friend. And Missy’s let her, because Missy’s scared of watching her go through another Clara.

Because Missy dreams too often of what may happen if she is the reason another Clara happens.

She looks at them now, the Doctor in her subdued power, waiting to emerge from the furious waters in the storm after so long, and Bill, a human that refuses to follow the path marked for her and yet… is only ever following the path of the companion, if at a slower rate than normal.

Missy rolls her eyes at them. She has to believe. It’s what the Doctor does. What the Doctor _did._ The Doctor used to have unyielding faith in so much, now she just trusts her gut in believing that this one tiny alien isn’t dangerous to the humans around her.

Because she has no one now to pick up the pieces of her if the alternative happens. Missy has never been fit for that, a broken vessel herself, with pieces lost across oceans the Doctor, too, has traveled.

“Well?” Missy says, hands on hips. “Can I come or do I need a signed permission slip?”

Nobody needs to answer that.

Together, they retrace some path the little thing might have gone on, hiding from everyone. This floor was too crowded moments ago, so Bill suggests that maybe the alien might have run upstairs or downstairs, through one of the less transited staircases on the side of the building.

As they’re approaching the next floor, Bill gets a terrible feeling in her stomach. She looks at her phone and realizes that at this hour, Heather’s got class _here_ now.

She immediately turns around towards the other two.

“Clearly, I must be wrong. Nothing here. Too quiet. Let’s go back down. Or up. Maybe it hid in the offices!”

Missy presses the side of her sunglasses and a low beeping fills the air.

“Oh, it’s here, alright.” She rubs her throat. It’s really getting sore now. “Honestly, why’d you ever stop wearing these? I can see _every_ thing…”

“I got distracted,” the Doctor says. “Seeing everything’s a curse.”

The two of them continue walking on. Bill feels like at any moment now one of the classroom doors will open, Heather will emerge, and the weirdest minute of her life will whirr itself into existence.

“I still can’t hear anything…” Bill says.

“It’s cloaking itself,” the Doctor mumbles. “But is it via a second system in the skin that lets it change or an ability to alter the impulses our brains register as sounds and visual stimuli? Because that could be different species.”

Thankfully, the Doctor and Missy follow the silence away from where Heather’s class is, and Bill breathes out in relief. She still looks behind her, just in case. This would be very difficult to explain. She’s not even very sure Heather would believe her.

The logical reaction to ‘honey, I’ve seen aliens’ is to _not_ believe it, to opt out and find someone who lives an ordinary life. Heather likes that ordinary life. There’d be no normal way to break this to her.

_Hey, hi. I know two aliens who teach where we study and are pretty weird, but also nice. And I’m helping them catch another alien that they don’t even know the species of. And that looks like their normal. Can that be my normal? A little bit?_

“Does knowing the species matter before you actually catch it and study it up close?” Missy asks the Doctor, smirking softly at her. “Do you want me to award you any points if you get it right? That could be fun. We’d be entertained while we look for it, at least.”

“No, it doesn’t _matter._ It’s just annoying. Do you have any idea what it feels like to _know_ for a fact that I’m getting rusty?”

Bill looks away. That conversation is not something she is meant to be a part of. Missy just tried to make a bit of a joke, though. She’s sure, and the Doctor… Her reply was definitely not uttered back in a joking mood.

Missy sneezes in place of an answer. Loudly. But Bill doesn’t think it’s staged.

For aliens from outer space, they are strangely human. They act like what Bill imagines people who have lived their whole lives together might. People who know each other so well they shouldn’t need to keep lying about themselves yet still do, because some things are still hard to come clean about. Is there such a thing as universal human nature for people who aren’t human but look it—act like it, _feel_ like it? Maybe it’s just universal nature, and humans put their own label on it because they’re self-centered enough to.

She walks behind them and wonders.

Again, after a while, silence gives way to a tiny little flash of _something_ that disturbs every sense, without really creating real interference in them. It hides in plain view and not very far away, but well enough that Bill could not point at it and say where exactly it is.

“I think it’s here,” she whispers to Missy and the Doctor. “I just can’t see it.”

“Leave that to me…” Missy says.

She activates the sonic sunglasses again and shushes Bill and the Doctor as they all try to approach another corner of the building. Every step makes their legs tremble from the effort it takes to move this slowly.

“Okay…” Missy says. “Bill, you’re closest to it, and I think it’s looking our way. Go around us and try to grab it while we distract it.”

“Very, very slowly. It’s still in camouflage mode. I still can’t hear or see it at all,” the Doctor says.

Bill moves as fast as she dares on Missy’s left. She feels like this should be done another way, with a big box or something they could use to trap the thing instead of their bare arms. What if the alien is slippery at touch? This is going to take all day, and her brain is stuck on _Heather Alert_.

“Alright. Just a little to your right now. It’s right by your foot,” Missy says.

Bill leans forward slowly, so very slowly her arms hurt.

And then Missy sneezes again.

It all happens very fast. There’s sound again, of footsteps rapidly moving away. The Doctor takes a giant leap forward following them, Bill sprints after her, and Missy wipes her nose with the back of her hand, but it keeps running.

“I saw it! It’s glowing!” the Doctor shouts in the distance.

Missy tries to run after her to add a description of the glittery smooth skin of the small creature that keeps waiting for them to arrive before it disappears again. But another sneeze catches her off-guard.

She hears Bill and the Doctor blabbering on about something, not too far away, and has to rest against a wall when her nose begins to run again. Is this the early stages of a cold? Isn’t it _too_ early for a cold?

Granted, fake leather isn’t very good to fend off low temperatures, but it is stylish, and no one has messed with her for dressing like a Victorian nanny / witch in a while. Now she’s just _a_ witch. Missy is very proud of her hair being the catalyst for that. Where she comes from, they’d call that space hair. She was hoping for time bitch, but, of course, no respectable college kid would actually say that with her in the surrounding area. Witch is close enough.

Another sneeze shakes her up.

“Oh, for the love of…” she complains.

That’s too many sneezes in a short span of time for it to be a cold. Her colds are normally overexaggerations of what a body can go through. She feels like a car ran her over, she spends a few days coughing her lungs out, then rises again fresh as a daisy to witness her cold wreck someone else’s life. Never the Doctor, the Doctor is immunized against everything.

Well, everything physical.

Missy waits a few more minutes by the wall, expecting the final sneeze or the ultimate itching of the throat that leaves her not wanting to talk again for a while. Which is also a weird cold symptom for her.

But eventually she realizes she’s just _leaning_ against a wall in the middle of the empty nowhere and leaves to see if she can find the other two she’s lost in the immensity of the building.

Unsurprisingly, given that it is a huge building and she has been there a while, that’s not what she finds.

The first thought going through her head is that she must have left the alien tracker on. That she must be seeing something as a result of that. Then, she laughs at herself. _The Doctor isn’t the only one who’s rusty._ It’s the integrated sonic X-Ray. She’s seeing through a wall _._

Just a shape, unmoving until it does. Behind a door that must be closed for a reason. But it’s not wood, and Missy loves the feel of just beeping at a door from above and watching it flick open.

She holds her breath when she feels the itching begin in the back of her throat, threatening to ascend, and turns the handle slowly. This time, she is going to catch this thing and find out what it is. All of time and all of space, it’s got to be worth something. Worth being able to name the unnamable once in a while, at least.

Her heels, thick and square as they are, still make noise on the wooden floor of the deserted classroom. A desk and lines and lines of tables for students to sit. She can see the little creature try and hide. And yet it is not hiding from her in the ways it can. She _hears_ its footsteps.

And the only way out is the door.

She’s got it cornered this time.

A few more steps and she’s there. She just has to hold her breath a little more. She will not fall prey to the impulses of a body in the depths of fall. She will not.

Missy crouches by a table. She can see it. Glistening like a water droplet against the sunlight. No wonder it can change itself enough to disappear, it can play with light. It could—

She can’t hold back the row of sneezes now.

The little alien runs away from her. Out the door, into the corridor. Back to square one.

She sneezes until it’s been a while and realizes, to her horror, that her hands are now covered in reddened skin.

“Allergic to an alien lifeform,” she says, her voice rasping on the way out. “That’s a first.”

And she didn’t even touch it.

Rising from the floor not without some effort, she heads back out on what feels like the umpteenth try. She can’t run, so she walks around, pays attention to the paintings on the walls and the advertisements students put on corkboards. It reminds her of home, and the attempts made at the academy to find solace in other people once the first days had taken all their childhood hope and dreams away.

Humans live collectively and pretend they don’t. They offer each other lessons in things someone else might not understand as well, they share food and housing, and have each other listed on their phones as primary contacts to be called when they’re alone and scared.

In Gallifrey, the lone wolf only survived by being exceptional. You needed a pack to last the day as the same person who started it. A pack… or a partner. It is messy, to exist within a mind that has been all of the above. Lone wolf, pack member, and a partner.

It must be messier, to not know how to exist between the three.

“Oh, suns, moons, and clear skies,” the Doctor exclaims at the sight of her.

The turn of a corner puts them together in the same spot once more. But she’s brought laughter again, the kind that makes her face happier, her expression fuller. Laughter by companion. And Missy isn’t just throwing that word in lightly.

The Doctor dramatizes but Bill asks Missy the real question:

“What happened to you?”

“Your bloody alien did. Done turned me into a useless damsel in distress now. Please tell me you had better luck.”

“Tiny invisible, inaudible creature that runs quick?” The Doctor crosses her arms, moves her head so her hair will fall away from her eyes, and smiles warmly at her. “Nah.”

“And you were supposed to be so good at running…” Missy says in a thick, I-have-a-cold voice.

“Next up, we’re going with Bill’s idea. Trap it with a box. Maybe cheese? Do you think it likes cheese?”

“It’s not a mouse,” Missy says.

“But it’s tiny.”

“More like a cat,” Bill says.

“How’d you trap a cat?” the Doctor says. Her smile is becoming a little bit like a mysterious smirk. Her eyebrows dance on her face.

Missy watches, trying to look normal. But between the allergies and the fact that this… hasn’t happened in months, she can’t. Her hearts begin pumping blood as if they hadn’t felt the sticky hot sauce of life going through them in forever.

This whole stupid endeavor is worth it, entirely so, only for this moment in which the Doctor is truly smiling for herself and no one else. Smiling because she likes and enjoys the game, a safe game that nobody will die playing.

_If you didn’t like danger so much,_ she thinks, looking longingly at the Doctor, _you could have this all day, every day, and no one would get hurt. You’d be happy. Why can’t you be happy?_

But she knows the answer. Somewhere after four or five lives, with grief and pain raining intermittently on the joy and relief that let a person truly live, happiness is less a state than it is a flash. There aren’t measures in the universe to speak of what happiness becomes to an immortal, after a few cycles of the same suffering are completed. There are no words for how hard it is to come to terms with the fact that living in itself is a fight for those flashes of happiness.

_I want you to be happy. Isn’t that the saddest part? Isn’t that the beginning of our cycle of sorrow?_

“Oh, come on!” the Doctor insists, when nobody answers her question about trapping cats—when _Missy_ doesn’t _,_ since it’s easy to assume Bill already knows, because they came together. “It’s fun. You make noises at it. Like this.” She pspspspsps at the air. Bill smiles, actually closing her eyes as she does, trying very hard not to do more than smile. “And you coordinate in various directions so that it can’t run away.”

“Yeah, well, don’t count on me. I’m sneezing and dropping snot all over the place. I won’t be much help,” Missy says. “Can’t even feel my hands.” She pauses to assess. “Mostly can’t.”

Bill grins.

“You can be bait, then.”

“Two bloody thousand years sailing the stars so that I can be used as bait to catch an alien cat. My luck never ceases to amaze me.”

But the Doctor laughs at the sarcasm and comes close to kiss her on the cheek. Her bad luck has much improved, just like that. Public displays of affection are the rarest, specially coming from someone who used to spend time as a Scot with a hug aversion.

Different life. Different circumstances. Different pain.

After they’ve huddled together to discuss the plan, Missy tosses the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses to Bill with a wink.

“Now you can actually see if your girlfriend’s coming _and_ catch the alien you don’t want her to run into. At the same time!” Missy teases, laughing to herself as they set off.

She sneezes, too. But now it doesn’t matter. They’re prepared for it. They have a plan.

* * *

“Professor?”

Missy doesn’t startle. A voice in an echoey place is just another thing that, in different times, she would have shot at. What’s she’s meant to be attracting now isn’t precisely that kind of attention, but rather the one of something that won’t even touch her. Or she’d rather it didn’t.

Absentmindedly, she scratches her hand with long black fingernails as she ambles around the corridor, trying to be very, very particular about the way she moves. So that it’s obvious, so that the little creature will notice her and realize it is, once again, being hunted.

“I’m sorry? Professor?”

Someone taps on her shoulder.

It’s never going to register, that title. Witch, bitch, Master. Any of those would be good. Even Doctor, she’s passed for him a few times. But professor? That’s more of a hobby than a real thing.

She turns around. “Yes. Me. Hi.”

It’s only a physical turning around, her eyes remain on the corners. Two sightings there can’t be coincidence. And the tappings on the floor she followed led here, to this exact one…

…where a couple of confused-looking students have interrupted her at work.

“Aren’t we supposed to be in class right now? There’s a few of us waiting for you there…”

They sound apologetic enough. They must still be young. Missy tries a smile. In her days, one missing professor was cause for a party, not going out into the desert to find said professor.

“Bit of a pause there. Will be right with you in a moment,” she says, immediately heading back forward towards the corridor.

She hears it now. The tapping on floorboards. It’s coming closer. Her throat warns her by tingling a little more than before. It gets better and then gets worse when the creature nears her. She’s never going to live this down.

“Professor?” they try again. “What’s going on?”

She ignores them. Here it comes. All she has to do is look tall. With two people behind her, then it cannot be that hard. It will make the alien’s off route-more difficult.

And give the Doctor more time to—

“Ah, here she comes.”

“Passing through. Sorry. Sorry!”

Like a cannon.

Missy laughs. She doesn’t care that they’re in the middle of the human world, in front of _humans_ who only see madness. This is the Doctor who runs. And she’s never loved it more.

_Neither have I_ , Missy thinks.

The Doctor runs like hell, chasing something neither of them can see but both can sense. It maybe slips past them. The Doctor points her screwdriver at it as she sprints off across the little crowd Missy and their students make up.

Missy takes a second look at the back of her, her coat shifting with the motion like a flag in the window. And then she runs after her.

In front of them, armed with a cardboard box and the sonic sunglasses—to see—Bill emerges from behind another corner.

She traps the glittery alien fluidly, smoothly. In a simple throw of the box, it keeps it in, not staying still, but visible. Gently, Bill crouches by it and lifts the box up a little, enough to dare stick her hands inside and touch at the creature she’s spent her morning going after.

“It’s soft!” she says. Her fingers don’t catch on skin, it barely registers as skin at all. It’s like… thick air, solid and round. She pets it as the other two run to her, laughing like teenagers under the rain, and finally looks up to the Doctor.

The Doctor throws her a small piece of equipment. Bill inserts it under the box, on the smooth surface of the alien.

“What’s… going on?” the General Astronomy students ask, a few feet behind them, peeking and not understanding.

Jumping to her feet, Bill throws the cardboard box away. All she’s holding in her hands is an adult orange cat that’s not looking very happy to be there, although it’s not fighting to break free either.

“Just a cat on the loose!” the Doctor says, clasping her hands together. “Bit of a hassle but it’s fine now. Nothing to worry about. It’s all fine.”

“It’s _cute!_ ” one of the students says. Bill comes closer so they can all pet it.

Even the Doctor skips closer to do the same, although it’s just for a bit of a pet on the creature’s head, as Missy stands far enough away, still catching her breath.

She reminds herself that this is why she does it, why she puts up with the long nights and the unbearable days. For moments like this, when there’s nothing but tenderness that might not make any sense but makes all of the difference.

* * *

Bill gently puts the alien down on the TARDIS floor.

“You’re just going to keep it around here?” she asks.

“Until I can find out where it came from,” the Doctor says.

“And you’re going to keep it _like that_?” Missy says, scrunching her face at the orange cat, or the image of it, curiously sniffing at everything.

She’s chosen to stay a few feet away from it. Just in case.

“I won’t lose it like this,” the Doctor says with a grin. She skips over to where the alien is, leans down to scratch its head.

Alien or cat or both, it lets her. The grin is more than that. It’s… a state of mind that hasn’t existed on this TARDIS since Clara Oswald and that Missy never thought she’d see again. Maybe not joy, maybe not glee, but calm? She would settle for calm any day.

Carefully, Missy steps to where Bill is standing. Bill, too, seems to enjoy the Doctor’s calmness. But Bill, unlike her, doesn’t know the worth of it. The value. The importance.

“Once upon a time, the Doctor used to sincerely be like this. Not all the time, but often enough that people wondered about her _heart_.” Those words in Missy’s soft, pleasant tone get Bill’s attention, her face turned over to Missy. “If she had the capacity for the truly iniquitous, how come there was so much brilliance, so much good? Now, the ray of sunshine… it’s just a façade so she can survive, kiddo. She’s more broken than she lets on.”

“I don’t understand…” Bill says.

“It’s okay,” Missy says, smiling feebly. She pats Bill’s hand. “You wouldn’t. But you still needed to hear.”

It’s easy to know what Bill will do next. Without answers, as there are hardly ever any, Bill stumbles forward, confused, and she joins the Doctor in praising a cat that’s not a cat.

What a scene those two make, on the floor of a time machine, making babbling noises, proper of baby talk, at an alien.

An instant frozen out of a better life.

“That was nice, wasn’t it?” Bill tells the Doctor.

“Couldn’t have done it alone. It would have taken me _so long_ just to device a trap and set it working.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. What did I do? Throw a box?”

“And run faster than me. That’s always good. We all need people who are better at us at what we’re good at, sometimes. That’s what teams are, really.” The Doctor stops petting the cat to look at Bill as if she had just remembered something. “ _And_ you came up with the idea to trap it, not just catch it.”

“You would’ve done that.”

“I don’t do everything. I can’t. I _try._ But the truth is… I can’t. And maybe it’s good, too, that I can’t.”

With a creak on her joins, the Doctor rises. She rises into the calmness that she now so hardly ever inhabits.

“Is this what I think it is?” Bill says. “Am I getting… permission or something? To do something awesome here? Do you have like a secret job or something you keep private? Something… more spacey than astronomy? D’you need me to help with that? Because I _could._ ”

Missy scoffs in amusement in the back.

“Something like that, yes.”

“Bill Potts,” the Doctor says. It seems at first that she’s going to build up to something, then— “Would you like to maybe hang out with us?”

“Catch aliens together. The wording is ‘would you like to catch aliens together’. Come on, we’ve been over this.”

“Shut up, you’re sneezing because of an alien cat. Your hands are all red.”

“It’s not a _cat_.”

“Hanging out,” the Doctor tries again, ignoring Missy. “And occasionally probably having to catch aliens together. Earth, never free of them, no matter how hard I try.”

“Yes!” Bill answers. “When do we start?”

“You might have accidentally started out today. That also happens often. I don’t ask questions when it does.”

Missy flinches. She _didn’t_ used to ask them and it led her to now.

“So how does this work? Do I just… come in here, see what you people got?”

“It’s more the other way around,” Missy intervenes. “ _It_ comes out _there,_ and catches you off-guard. Fun, really.”

Bill nods. “Nice, nice. So I guess I’ll… see you, then?”

“You’re not staying?” the Doctor asks. “Now comes the really fun part, getting to find out where the alien came from and what it is and—”

“Raincheck. I’m meeting my girlfriend for lunch.”

Bill bounces off her heels when she says that. Love can really be so young, so full of hope. It would be cruel to prune it early.

She leaves, not knowing, and it’s good that she doesn’t. The age of love truly arrives one day and that is when it hits the lover, what time can stretch out infinitely and what it cannot. What love the feeling is, how it fades, and what love the commitment, the promise, rescues from the silence the former leaves behind.

_So many types of love…_

“Right,” the Doctor says. She springs into clear, beautiful motion at once. Somewhere in a box, inside the bigger box, she grabs a piece of a tool and waves it at Missy. “Enhanced perception filter. Not just visuals, smell and touch, too.”

“So, we’re really keeping the cat, aren’t we?” Missy says amusedly.

“We’re a little bit keeping the cat.”

The Doctor kneels by it again. The filter merges into its orange fur, exactly like the other one had before.

“Try approaching it. I don’t think it’ll affect you now.”

Missy scrunches her face and shakes her head.

“Hateful little thing. No, thanks,” she says.

And yet when the Doctor turns around, laughing to herself, Missy only waits a few minutes before she lets the cat come to her.

It’s little, alright, and staring up at her with curious eyes. But… she’s not sure about hateful.

Without even meaning to, she rolls her eyes and leans forward to pet it, too. The cat purrs under her touch and then coils around her leg, to hop away a few moments later.

“What are we going to name it?” the Doctor asks animatedly.

Missy is very unhappy to find out that the Doctor is watching her, succinctly as she can.

“Maybe, since you’ve already made your little companion offer, we should wait for Bill’s take,” Missy replies. “And… not to be a pain, but _maybe_ we should also get to class. The kids have already gone too long without planets, and they live on one.”


	7. Intermission, interception

The nights have always been the worst. Long, lonely stretches in which time doesn’t seem to pass. In which it’s just the Doctor in the dark and all the longing sighs of a time machine cannot fill the silence, cannot lull her into sleep. Nothing can.

Missy has tried everything to help. Body pillows, Mozart for babies, baths. Missy _tries._ But give her fifteen minutes on any surface, and she cannot help falling asleep. She looks so peaceful when she closes her eyes and finally lets go of the worry that piles up during the day, carrying weights that aren’t all hers.

The Doctor can never bring herself to wake her up. There have been plenty of nights like this in the past. Nothing changes just because now she’s not alone. Although she wishes, just for a moment, that things could be a little like they were in the Academy, when she was back to sleeping in the same barn as the rest of her class, and Missy held her hand when they were both scared and only one knew how to pretend not to be.

Now, she tosses and turns, and Missy dreams.

Sometimes, the Doctor hears those dreams, drifting around the air of the room until they fade.

She has never asked. Missy never tells her. It’s too many thoughts and voices to keep track of. The important thing is that the dreams haven’t stopped, and that Missy always wakes up with more prominent bags under her eyes.

… _why can’t you be more like…_

The bed shakes. It’s only for a second. A tenth of a heartbeat. But it’s enough. She sits up at once, and as she does, Missy jumps out of sleep with a loud gasp that pierces the silence.

The Doctor huddles closer, her back against the wall, the covers up to her bent knees.

“You alright?” she mutters.

“I’ll be _fine_ ,” Missy grumbles, her breath still a bit shaky. “I was fine before you, I’ll be fine now, too.”

The Doctor just looks her in the eye. In the dark, all pretenses fall. The fight that goes on during daylight takes on a different dimension in here. It is magnified in the little spaces, brought to a quality that can be shooed away as soon as they leave the TARDIS and this yellow bed behind. But it exists now, as mighty and terrifying as the monsters from their childhoods. It does not do to pretend to be bigger than it is.

“You don’t have to be anything,” the Doctor tells Missy.

Missy holds her gaze only for a moment, then she lies back down, her back turned to the Doctor. But this time her breathing doesn’t slow down, not in fifteen minutes. Not after half an hour.

After half an hour, after thirty long minutes of wondering if she has really lost the skills that allowed her to surface from the silence of not understanding and help out, the Doctor speaks.

“Did I ever tell you the story of a young aspiring traveler on Gallifrey, daring enough to steal Rassilon’s daughter away?” she mutters softly.

Missy scoffs against her pillow.

“I hate that story. You never tell it right.”

“And why is that, d’you reckon?”

Missy turns back to face the Doctor without thinking that maybe this is exactly what the Doctor wants.

“Because you always somehow fail to mention she fancied you too much for the overall situation to even deserve to be called the _stealing away_ of anyone. You can’t steal anyone away if they want to come along for the ride.”

A few seconds later, Missy laughs to herself anyway, putting an arm under her head and sighing.

“No wonder the old man hated you…” she says. “Steal his daughter, steal his moon, steal his planet. He must have thought you wanted his life.”

“We both did, for a little bit,” the Doctor reminds her. Of a time when they were alike too, only on a very different end of the spectrum. Young, careless, and ignorant. Gallifrey was only a giant game of chess to the both of them, a game they played to win. “She must have been very pretty…”

Missy looks at the Doctor, confused for a second.

“Who?”

“Rassilon’s daughter. Can’t remember her name now. Been too long…”

“Does that matter? You stole her away to prove a point. She probably was disappointed, the poor thing. All those pretty little things you take away for a bit, I wonder what it feels like, to be dropped back home without so much as a goodbye kiss.”

“Not my style.”

Missy sighs again.

“You stole this TARDIS to the ends of the universe,” she says, and then she looks the Doctor right in the eye, with so much unspoken between what she says. “But, I wonder, did you steal _me_ , with your astonishment over who I’ve become? Or did I steal _you_ away, when I astonished you?”

“I don’t think you can steal anybody away if they want to come along for the ride,” the Doctor says, her face perfectly serious. “I’ve gone on a lot of them, probably more than even I can count. This is the ride I’m not getting off, Missy. So…” She takes a deep breath. “Stop going around in circles. Because I’m right beside you, running—I’m right beside you, _waking._ ”

Missy sits up as well, slowly, almost slithering up. She leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes. It is as good as surrendering to the Doctor. She has done that so many times, but it never stops feeling like something else, something darker. A defeat.

“What did you dream about this time? Maybe there’s a pattern,” the Doctor asks, hopeful. She is only hopeful these days when it doesn’t affect her directly. That’s what hurts Missy the most. The Doctor, without hope for herself, full of it in case she can give it to someone else, giftwrapped, with a bow on top.

“What I always dream about,” Missy says.

Gallifrey, moonless and covered in ash and fire.

Her own laughter, the drums, the pulse of evil.

An incontrollable desire to go back to all of that.

An unshakable feeling that she will end up there regardless.

The planet, the scenario, that’s never important. It’s always her, Missy, this body and this mind, corrupted again to hurt and maim and let the rains of chaos burn countries to the ground as she cackles in it like deadly fire.

Sometimes, the Doctor is there to try and stop her. To bare her teeth at her, to threaten her with guns the Doctor has never carried in her presence for a very long time.

Sometimes, the Doctor dies because of her.

And Missy always wakes up before she can see that through.

Even her dreams know better than to torture her with that.

All these years, even at her worst, at her most evil, at her darkest, there was one thing Missy kept working towards and yet still was terribly unable to do, despite her promises.

“Things that happened once,” Missy finally replies. “Things that may still come to pass someday. And there’s nothing much to do about that, you know how it is. The future is a lottery and none of us ever really buy any tickets, we just show up the day of the lottery draws uninvited and most of the time unsure, too, of the day it is.”

“Don’t we always?” the Doctor half-says, half-mutters.

* * *

The door of the TARDIS opens to reveal Bill, grandiosely stepping forward and awfully proud of herself.

It is a bit of a pity that the only voice close enough to where she’s standing comes all the way from inside the main corridor.

Missy’s head pops out for a moment to look at her, eyebrows arching. “Who let you in?”

“Nobody,” Bill replies, confused, pointing at the door and not meaning this door. “It was open. You really should get a lock on that.”

Bill walks across the console room, leaving her stuff on the chair. A chair that, throughout the many TARDIS remodelations, never fails to remain a good too many feet away from the controls. She leans on the door to the corridor, arms crossed.

“What are you two up to on this wonderful morning I was, might I add, quite early to?” she asks Missy, who’s back to keeping her eye on the far end of the corridor.

“I think the cat fell into the pool. There’s been a bit of a mishap getting it out, I believe.” Almost fatedly decided to happen in this instant, screeches and a loud yell echo in the TARDIS. Missy nods pointedly in the direction of the noise. “And there _continues_ to be.”

“And you’re not there because…?” Bill asks, amused.

“I’m not allowed near the pool,” Missy recites by heart, annoyed.

“You have—you have a _pool_.”

“There’s a whole dimension in here.” Missy pats the TARDIS’s wall as she would the upper thigh of someone she was attracted to. “People have been known to get lost sometimes. But the pool is a favorite room, regardless of the rotating cast. Last time I was there, I had this TARDIS all to myself and I might have set free a bit of a sea monster as a surprise present for the Doctor. Granted, I was blond and evil then, but still. Someone clearly thinks the temptation to drown a cat would be too great for me now. So someone’s presently wet and getting scratches all over her.”

Bill doesn’t get nearly half of that, but context isn’t necessary for the bigger picture, which she enthusiastically shares.

“Yeah, I‘m sorry, I have to go see that,” she says, already running past Missy and not caring about the fact that she does not know where anything is in the big TARDIS dimension.

“Actually, I think watching from outside the pool room might also work out. Loophole,” Missy says, running to catch up to her.

When they arrive, a few turns and corners and long corridors later, they find the most bizarre of sights. The Doctor’s blue rainbow outfit minus the coat entirely soaked in chlorine water, dripping onto the floor as she holds a very wet, very angry creature that has somehow ceased to thrash against her. Both might as well be done quarrelling on the floor by how angrily they’re breathing.

“Okay, so we can at least conclude its species hates water,” Bill says to break the silence.

Yet the silence goes on. The Doctor merely approaches Bill to hand over the orange cat to her. The cat leaps over from arms to arms as if nothing had happened, but seems to shift from a quite terrifying glare into a tamer growling expression in Bill’s touch.

The Doctor groans in its direction, pointing a dripping finger.

“I just saved your life, you tiny little orange thing!” she says.

Missy cackles uncontrollably at the back of the corridor, holding back her stomach. She breaks the rules and enters the pool room, now finally quiet, to grab a couple of towels.

She’s not even careful not to step on puddles of water, entirely unafraid to ruin her boots or get her jeans wet. Her hands simply drape the towel over the Doctor’s shoulders and she beams at her. The Doctor’s tension doesn’t dissipate entirely under Missy’s command, but it does fade somewhat into that rare instance of calmness that seems to exist nowadays between classes and nights.

The second towel, Missy throws at Bill, but the cat shakes itself off before she can actually dry anything with it.

“Whoa…” Bill says. “The not-so-tiny orange alien cat doesn’t like to be told what to do, huh?” She looks up from the cat’s face to Missy and the Doctor. “Hey, shouldn’t we stop calling it orange alien cat? It’s so impersonal and so long. Haven’t you guys thought of any name you’d like?”

Missy scoffs and has to actually bite her tongue not to laugh at how that sounds like.

“It probably already _has_ a name,” the Doctor says, drying off the ends of her hair, “but without knowing the species for sure, and if it won’t communicate, the TARDIS won’t translate and confirm anything via language. So all I can guess is that it’s either intelligent and choosing to play along, or a sort of animal species from another planet, very, very confused and somehow stranded with us.”

“Can’t you use the TARDIS as a scanner or something? I mean, upload a picture, sort of like with Google, and have it tell you what species it is?” Bill asks, gently scratching the cat’s head. It lets her, even arching it so that Bill’s fingers will scratch precisely where it wants her to.

“I tried,” the Doctor says. Missy giggles in the background because she knows what happened. “But it’s too translucid. It won’t register, it just gives me a list of possible ideas and a _very_ passive-aggressive message to handle it on my own. _Please manually input data to find out more._ And what would I even write on a manual input? Glitters? Occasional intentional noise? Smallish? The TARDIS would judge me. She once judged me for playing the Gymnopédies for five hours—”

“Nobody could ever see why, clearly,” Missy butts in.

The Doctor puts the towel back around her shoulders for her hair to naturally drip on that, even though she’s already drenched, and raises both index fingers in the air.

“But,” she says, “that was when it was on land. Dry, I mean. We’re still on land here, technically. A pool is still land, a pool can’t be on the sea, not even if it’s on a boat, which is sailing _on_ the sea.” She shakes her head a bit when she realizes she’s lost track and raises her eyebrows. “Point is, what if light refracts directly through it when it’s underwater?”

Bill instinctively moves the alien a bit away, just in case, although she doesn’t say anything and keeps listening.

“Please don’t drown the cat. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but don’t drown the cat,” Missy says.

The Doctor takes the towel back from around her shoulders.

“I’m not drowning the cat.” She gives the towel back to Missy, who takes it and looks at it, most confused.

“Ooooooh,” Bill says, looking at the Doctor, then at Missy. “You’re getting back _in_ with the cat. I could get in with the cat, I get the feeling it doesn’t want a repeat of the experience with you.”

As if it had understood her, the alien begins to struggle against Bill’s arms. But the Doctor grabs it away regardless, as gently as she can. She already has a few long scratches all over the skin of her forearms, but despite them, she doesn’t fear to fumble in the animal’s fur until she finds something invisible to the eye. It clicks under her fingers and the image disappears. She holds jelly and light and glitter in her hands, translucid and almost entirely transparent, but more solid than any of them have seen it so far.

Definitely there, definitely visible, and fighting.

Missy takes a few steps away, just in case. She thinks she can already feel the ghost of itching and soreness coming back, and does not want any part in that again.

“Here goes nothing,” the Doctor says, jumping back into the pool.

The alien emerges first, like Excalibur out of a lake, then the Doctor rises beneath it. She holds it right in front of her eyes, well above water so it won’t fall back in, and this time wastes not a single second to observe the effect of fresh droplets on it.

It cannot hide. It cannot mimic the surroundings well enough anymore. Water confuses it, because water is so like it, a void to its membranes and its sensors.

And that _does_ ring a bell.

“The Nagil!” the Doctor shouts, full of joy. “Only species I know of that needs water to survive but will definitely avoid it as much as they can anyway! Because it’s the only moment of unwilling vulnerability they can experience. Like prey in the savannah when they go drink but they’re surrounded by lions that have been waiting all day!”

In that moment of absolute chaos, the alien frees itself from her grip and falls into the water, disappearing slightly into almost complete transparency, only to reemerge as it climbs onto the floor and tries to run away.

Bill, slippery as the creature is, still manages to hold it back into her arms before it can.

“It knew how to swim,” Bill says.

“Of course it did,” Missy says, biting her lip so as not to laugh. She smirks in the direction of the pool, trying to feel a little bit sad about the Doctor, who has now gotten wet twice for mostly nothing. Comfort, largely, that the creature they’re granting sanctuary of a sorts to is safe to keep around.

When the Doctor comes back into the dry world, Missy throws the towel her way again.

“Get the filter back on,” the Doctor tells Bill. “Or we’ll lose it. And losing a chameleon creature in here isn’t like losing it in your university halls. That’d be one hell of a day.”

Bill doesn’t struggle to find the perception filter. When the alien is camouflaged into the cat shape, it hides itself, but now… in this jelly form, it is a small round thing that is more or less easy to access if the alien stays still. Somehow, for some reason Bill doesn’t understand, it likes her and it lets her.

A placid cat then rests in her arms.

“You both rose from the water,” Bill says. “Sort of like King Arthur. You know, from the legends and stuff. If he was to rise from a pool and not that lake where he—well, you get it. Might make a good name, though.”

Missy elbows the Doctor on the side.

“It definitely does! Much better than Bojangles McDuff or… what was the other one I came up with? Orange Toto.”

“Toto’s a _dog._ ”

“Were you waiting for me to choose one?” Bill guesses. “You really didn’t have to!”

A wave of warmth reaches her. They haven’t known each other long at all, and yet these two… postponed the naming of what is essentially their alien, their cat, to brainstorm with her. Bill hasn’t really had this with anyone before that wasn’t Heather. It’s… nice, really nice. Her whole face feels like a giant smile that could only go on growing if she let it.

“Arthur’s dignified. Maybe the whole of Britain was really waiting for him to rise,” the Doctor says, looking longingly at it. She wonders if maybe Arthur existing with this name simultaneously as she does in this plane of reality is not coincidental. She, too, has risen, in many more ways than that. Risen and emerged.

But is she ready to truly do more than that and _come back_?

“You’re gonna assign pronouns to a whole alien animal, too?” Bill says to her, laughing.

“Oh, never let the Doctor or me ever ramble on to you about the complexity of gender in our society, we’ll go ahead and gender animals and machines unprompted like you humans do,” Missy teases, “all while philosophizing about it grandiosely. _Why’s a ship a she?_ ”

The Doctor takes the bait, deliciously so.

“TARDISes are sentient!”

“But do they have gender?”

“I don’t and I still go by pronouns most of the time—minus once with otters, which _doesn’t_ count! And it’s not like I can _ask_ the TARDIS.” The Doctor pauses and frowns. “Well, I guess I could have, that one time. Didn’t really think to ask…”

“Just for recollection here, since it’s getting a teeny bit confusing,” Bill says. “ _She/her_ for the three of us? The TARDIS is not inanimate, the Doctor uses _she_ for her, too, but only in an affectionate kind of personal way, and for more like ‘it’s a time machine’ announcements there’s no _she_ because of the impact of the sentence? And we’re calling the cat Arthur after King Arthur and assigning _he/him_ to him because of… the binary, since there’s no way to know what pronouns King Arthur liked best, if there actually was a King Arthur?”

Neither Missy nor the Doctor bat an eye.

“Basically, yeah,” they say at the same time.

The Doctor wrinkles her face reflexively.

“You know, after… that,” she says, “whatever the body I end up in next time, I think I’m skipping _he/him_ and _she/her_ entirely…”

Bill cocks her head, still stuck on her own thoughts, remembering where she’s standing. “ _Was_ there a King Arthur?”

The Doctor shrugs.

“I don’t know. Never looked.”

The three of them laugh together after a breath or two, affably. None of them really care much about the original King Arthur, or if there was one. It’s just the moment they’re existing in that makes them feel, in the webs of time, like children about to fall asleep, content and full, somehow.

It doesn’t feel like they met only days ago and have bonded over an alien creature that ceases to be so a little more every moment that passes.

“Arthur…” Bill says, looking into the eyes of the cat as it gazes into her own, seemingly bored. “Yeah, he kinda looks like an Arthur.” Then: “Bojangles McDuff. Who came up with that?”

Missy chuckles. “Who do you think?”

The Doctor wrinkles her face at Missy for messing with her and shakes out her hair, towel back on her shoulder.

“I’m going to dry myself off properly and get dressed,” she says. And, as she makes for the door, she turns slightly back. “Hey, Bill, how _early_ did you make it here today?”

Bill’s whole face lights up, as she’s reminded of her first feat of the day.

“An hour or so. Heather is _so_ proud of me. There was some electrical problem—flickering lights in the bathroom—, I said I’d stay and fix it with her, but she insisted this was my chance to prove I really am capable of _not_ running late.” Bill shrugs. “She sort of convinced me with her—uh—enthusiasm and almost made me late to being early, ironically.”

Nobody needs to explain what that means to Missy, who pats Bill’s upper arm in sorority (so as not to disturb Arthur), but the Doctor doesn’t get it.

“Want to come with us to class? You’d be welcome to stay in the TARDIS, but I don’t trust her much with newcomers. She gets pissy sometimes.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bill says with a giant smile on her face. “I love space. I can’t wait to see it for myself.”

* * *

When weeks pass, and life goes on, Bill starts to stop expecting the unexpected. Her life has changed, and no one knows, but now the changes are no longer so noticeable. She’s early so she can visit the office in the top floor for a while, before heading back to her classes, and then she maybe hangs around until it’s time to go to work. Sometimes she stays for so long that she has to ask for a bit of a time-traveling favor. But isn’t that basically like asking a friend with a car to drive you places instead of planning ahead to walk or take the bus? She simply has friends with time-machines now.

Friends who know so much, who share it sometimes. Bill makes room in her schedule to sit in their classes and hear them talk about the universe. People might just assume it’s textbook stuff, something they might have picked up by listening to NASA documentaries as they got their degrees. But she knows better. Even if the Doctor and Missy don’t talk much about where they’re from and what they did before Earth, Bill has learned they have always been the universal equivalent of _worldly._

They know distances that other professors would need the support of a slide to say correctly. They explain with vivid detail the state of stars that have been dead for thousands or millions of years. They have names and stories for things that exist outside of the observable range of telescopes.

And Bill imagines a life in which all of that is as real as this planet, as tangible and breathable. She imagines what it must feel like to walk among cascades of liquid silver that solidifies as soon as it’s fallen. But imagining it is all she can do.

Little orange Arthur is the last connection she has to life outside the doors of Earth, and her obvious curiosity doesn’t seem to have seeped very far into the plans that Missy and the Doctor have for themselves and the foreseeable future.

Bill returns over and over again, hopeful still. The TARDIS is a whole dimension, and as she tells Heather every morning, when Heather complains about the uncertainties of life, anything could happen. Between a time machine bigger on the inside, three aliens, and a town that so far has had two alien incidents in a row, Bill has high hopes. She probably shouldn’t, but she does.

Maybe her shop will teleport her back to that warehouse. Maybe more animals like Arthur will appear in the corridors of St. Luke’s.

Something awesome, something extraordinary. Something new.

_Anything._

It’s not even such a big deal, is it? That Heather doesn’t know? That Bill wouldn’t know how to tell her? She’s sure that plenty of other people might have had this very same problem and put off solving it for as long as they could.

How _do_ you tell someone that the fact that anything can happen is what you want, but only to fill the gaps of time in which you’re not with them?

Bill doesn’t think of aliens and time and space when she’s with Heather. She imagines just how hard that would be to believe _. It’s not you, it’s everything else._ Exceptions hardly ever work. Why would Heather choose to take it as an absolute truth? Bill wouldn’t.

That thought takes her a little too far away and she forgets to grab the TARDIS door on the way in before it slams quite loudly when it closes. The noise echoes across every crevice that it can stretch into. Unlike in the TARDIS she is most used to, there is no reprimanding tolling for the slamming.

“Doctor?” Missy shouts from somewhere in the depths.

“No. It’s Bill!”

“Come in, the light will guide you! Can’t miss it.”

Bill looks around her and allows herself a moment to doubt that.

She’s never been inside this TARDIS. She’s never even realized there was another one in this office. She always found it odd that there was a blue door exactly like the TARDIS’s just slammed on a wall that faced the outdoors and half-covered by a blanket, but Bill never really thought to ask. She wasn’t going to spend any time in the actual office, anyway. Then again, today she’s come in to find the doors to the Doctor’s TARDIS locked, and as she fretted over Heather and space, she has discovered that the blanket has simply been removed to reveal a copy of the TARDIS’s door.

Walking inside has been barely an afterthought.

She ventures herself into the corridor, the same shape as the Doctor’s, and follows the carpet under a fading light that faintly peeks at the end of it, probably coming from one of rooms on the many other sides.

Serpentine as it is, it only takes her a little while to come out where she needs to be. She finds Missy on the floor of an ample, very geometrical-looking, room, and before her, towering over her, a machine Bill cannot name and, all around, smallest pieces of other machines that don’t quite match.

Before Bill can even ask, Missy says:

“She’s gone for groceries, I think. It really wouldn’t hurt her, to give me some pointers when she leaves, but oh well… She says I snore and still puts up with it. So I suppose I must silently put up with her many, many domestic quirks as well.”

“You guys really do live here, don’t you?”

“Yup. Parking two TARDISes inside a flat would be _such_ a waste of space.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” Bill points at the machinery. “What’cha got there?”

“Some project. Something to do,” Missy says, without turning to look at Bill. When she realizes she might need to give the poor thing some context, Missy relaxes her face and adds: “Hobby, in your language.”

Sitting down on the floor, next to her, Bill takes a piece of equipment in her hand to observe.

“Mechanics?”

“Of a kind.”

For a while, Bill just watches, interested, as Missy tries to put pieces together, to take some off, to _understand_ patterns that Bill cannot see in the language of the machine. She does see scorch marks that must be old already, but she doesn’t ask. She sees many things sometimes she knows she isn’t supposed to ask about.

She grabs a wrench to fiddle with when she notices Missy isn’t using it anymore.

“You think I could, I don’t know, help you around with something that needs doing sometime?” Bill asks.

Missy quits frowning at her matrix to turn to her. Bill is not even going for eye contact, her gaze fixed on the wrench between her fingers.

“What do you have in mind?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. What? Mechanics? I don’t know much about _human_ machines, but I’m sure I could pick up a book so we could learn a thing or two together before you went ahead and became the master of it.” Missy giggles to herself. There’s a joke there only for her to get. “You humans have so little time, it’s only fair you picked up skills quickly…”

“No,” Bill laughs, too. At the idea. She’s not very fond of grease and metal. “Not really my area, that. But… I don’t know. I feel like maybe I’m intruding lately, and if you need a hand with something… You just know _so much_ , you can’t possibly have time for it all.”

Missy smiles at her with a grace and a patience she hasn’t exercised in this way, directed at someone of Bill’s age and condition, in months. She thought once she was good at it, she thought being good at it would make for a decent redemption.

“Honey, look at where you’re standing,” she tells Bill. “Has my nutty Doctor forgotten to tell you the most basic thing about the TARDIS?”

Bill can’t help a snort at ‘nutty Doctor’. The ‘my’ is something she notices and doesn’t ask about, not because she _can’t_ or feels she can’t, but because she doesn’t _need_ to.

“What?” she asks anyway.

“What…” Missy repeats. “What do you think TARDIS _means_? No name is ever just a name. Language doesn’t just fall out of trees.”

“It stands for something, then. Why is that not surprising?”

“Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Time travel, space travel. You’re never late, you’re never early,” Missy continues. “It’s constantly being the future around here, you can learn to do anything you want and not have to worry about time.”

But the encouragement in her eyes, strong and powerful as Missy usually tries to be, dies down with her words, with the sigh that overtakes them.

“Ah, but it shouldn’t be me telling you all of this…” she mutters, mostly to herself. Then, she looks at Bill again. Because she knows _someone_ has to tell Bill all of this, sometime. And it might as well be Missy. “It normally is her, you know? Bubbly, nutty, excited. But not just for a while.” Missy exhales a short laugh. “She used to be able to ramble on about her TARDIS for ages. Hell, couldn’t live without it, couldn’t get _off_ it.” She sighs again. “When the Doctor traveled still… and took the whole of the world everywhere with her.”

Bill doesn’t look away from Missy, this stranger that is a little bit less so every day. Her shoulders slump forward in a gesture of defeat that Bill knows in a way. In a completely different way. She has someone, too, who grounds her. Yet her doubts, her reluctance, don’t come from the same place as Missy’s do. Missy and Bill hide very dissimilar things in the stories that they’re not telling.

“Well, in any case, point made,” Missy says, clapping the grease out of her hands as she slithers her butt closer to her matrix. Bill’s got to admit it’s a gorgeous piece of technology, whatever it is that it does. “Find something you like doing and devote yourself to it. You can even help me with this, if you want.”

“Nah, I’m fine,” Bill says. “For now, I like watching how you do it.”

They remain in silence for some time again. It doesn’t seem like Missy’s getting anywhere with it, but she doesn’t display any signs of frustration as long as Bill’s there. And Bill keeps quiet as long as she can, thinking. Missy’s been nice to her, if a little strange at times. She won’t lose anything by asking. It’s nowhere near as intimidating as asking the Doctor, who might do a lot more than _understand._ The Doctor might really have answers, and Bill isn’t entirely ready for those. She is seeking something else.

“Is it really okay for me to come here all the time?” Bill asks, her voice interrupting itself from how quickly she’s said it.

“Run away from your life all you like, Bill. No one will judge you for that here,” Missy replies.

She refrains from adding a truth that few people hear when they should: everyone who meets the Doctor, who is granted the permission to tag along for the ride, eventually ends up hopping on the TARDIS to run _away._ From, to. It never matters.

“I’m not running away,” Bill says. And she really isn’t, she’s finding something _else_ to live for. “I’m just… keeping a secret, I guess.”

Missy’s breath stops for a second in her chest, where she keeps that secret that is only hers. Her big, big secret that is the only thing that still lets her have hope.

Bill’s wording is random and yet it tugs at her fear, that primal feeling in her gut that only comes out at night when nothing else can scare her.

“Is she worth it?” Missy asks quietly. She’s not even sure it’s a question to herself or a question to Bill in its entirety. Maybe it’s just both.

There _is_ hope in Bill’s dreams. In what she does and what she plans on doing after she comes here. Missy wouldn’t ever want to take that away, and she would like to understand it.

“I don’t know, I’m afraid that if I tell her, I’ll ruin something I don’t wanna ruin, you know? People don’t usually believe you when you say you’ve seen a UFO, imagine the conversation if I say I helped catch an alien cat and put it into a… dimensionally engineered time machine that’s bigger on the inside.”

Missy laughs softly.

“And you haven’t even seen what’s out there. Wait till you get down under to the kingdom of ice that awaits beneath the sea.”

As soon as she’s spoken, Missy’s jaw drops as she realizes it. _Of course_.

“You’re stuck between your Heather and what the Doctor didn’t realize she was promising you…” she says. She can’t believe it took her this long to put it into coherent words in her head.

Bill blushes a little.

“When you say it like that…”

“No, it is like that. She didn’t realize she _was_ promising it and then not providing. I told you, Bill. She’s not herself.” Missy’s serious tone diffuses any jokingness that may have reigned previously in the conversation, any parenting tone that may have existed. Now, Missy stands a bit taller, with the knowledge that Bill needs and the advice she has been after. “You’re going to have to sit with her and tell her you want a bit of adventure. Otherwise she’s never going to see, she’ll just retract into her shell more and more. And… as for Heather, I think, in the end, nobody knows better than us what we are supposed to tell, or not, our loved ones.”

Bill gets the feeling that is a double-edged piece of advice, but still appreciates the fact that Missy can give it and take it at the same time.

“Don’t feel guilty for running away from that, dear,” Missy finishes, patting Bill’s hand and glancing down at the wrench Bill is still holding. “Now, I’m _really_ going to need that back.”

Across the other side of the TARDIS, a door opens loudly, then closes with a bang.

“Missy???”

“In here!” Missy yells.

She quickly grabs the wrench and rearranges everything around her so that it looks untouched, but doesn’t get up from the floor, so Bill decides not to either.

She looks at Missy before they’re unavoidably interrupted.

“Thanks,” she says.

Missy just smiles back at her.

The Doctor shows up by the door holding up a bag of stuff and Arthur tailing her. She watches him watch her for a moment before he decides to go in and plop down next to Bill.

“Did you lock him in here without his toys?” the Doctor asks Missy.

“I thought he might be lonely all alone over at yours,” Missy replies. “You disappeared and I was going to be here for a while.”

The Doctor rummages inside her bag and presents her acquisitions proudly.

“I got tea!” she says, holding up four paper cups in one hand. “No-spillage lid! Plastic-less cup! _And…_ it was really cheap.” She makes one of her confused faces. “I think.”

She hands one over to Bill, who thanks her quietly, but when the Doctor offers a cup to Missy as well, Missy just stares at it for a second before she grabs it, too.

The Doctor drops her bag of non-perishables on the corner and sits, cross-legged, on the floor with them. Arthur immediately stops pretending to be bored and jumps on his feet to go investigate what’s in the bag. She stretches a hand to keep him from biting the bag a couple of times. It’s a measure of how much their relationship has grown that he doesn’t hiss at her and is content enough with glaring.

“What were you two doing while I was gone?” she asks.

The non-crime crime scene must be distracting enough. All those puzzle pieces, scrambled in all directions, with the biggest of all standing right in the middle, the most distracting of all. Missy drinks her tea with her back turned to her matrix, and Bill tries to make sense out of everything in her friends that doesn’t.

The silences. The longing gazes. The mistakes.

What is that past that they hide? Why does it keep them anchored in the trench between present and future?

“Talking, mostly,” Bill says in the end. “Arthur got locked in, I got locked out. I didn’t even know you had a second TARDIS.”

“Oooh, you have no idea the things we have two of,” Missy says.

“It also looks so much like yours, Doctor.”

“That’s because it’s a genetic offspring of mine.” She swiftly moves to lay on her stomach, feet up in the air as she picks up a random metal piece from the floor to play with. “It’s a very long story.”

“Very, very long. Try growing an entire dimension out of a piece of wood,” Missy says.

“But it’s… empty, mostly. The Doctor has rooms full of things. You can see it all piling inside from the corridors, but this…”

“I spend all my time over there. And all the time I once spent in here I spent—” Missy stops herself in time. She clears her throat and forces herself to smile. “Well, alone. There was little point in hoarding anything.”

“Don’t you have basic furniture?” Bill asks, seriously worried. “If you’ve lived here, you would have needed that.”

Missy genuinely looks at her with warmth in her eyes.

“She stole some,” the Doctor says, slowly retracting from her current position so that she can now be on her back and raise her legs up on a wall. She’s still frowning at metal. “So she could take me to a rooftop seven thousand light years away and we had somewhere to sit.”

“That’s not—” Missy says, blushing. “I didn’t _steal_ it _then_. I had already _stolen_ it. Plus, I didn’t see you complaining at the time.”

Bill laughs at the two of them, bickering over something this tiny that isn’t, not for a moment, not even when compared to a distance as vast. Instances in a lifetime are as tiny as you make them out to be. When you remember them, they always seem bigger, because you want them to be. Bill laughs, but she sighs. Even something like this, a trip across the stars, is a reminder.

She wonders if she should just casually bring it up. If, like Missy says, it’s even worth it. Isn’t it already _good_ to be able to exist here, in this small greatness of life that nobody else can even imagine exists a few floors above their heads?

She forces herself to smile. For her friends and the adventures they’ve had together. Adventures that sound like fairytales, even when she hasn’t heard them in their entirety.

“You two must have a lot of fun when you’re not working here,” she says.

It’s the wrong thing to say. Bickering turns to awkward laughter. Gazes turn to walls, to fingers.

“I guess… yeah, I guess we used to,” the Doctor says.

The question Bill wants to ask is a terrifying thing to say out loud, to someone she both admires and fears. The Doctor might seem small and a little bit odd, but Bill _feels_ it in her bones that all that fascinating ambivalence between weird and dark is nothing but the surface of her. Whoever the Doctor really is, Bill longs to know as much as she does to discover the universe—and she suspects sometimes the two must be connected in some way—but Bill is smart, and she knows the answers can’t be acquired directly. She has to ask the right questions first. She has to find the right words. Or, rather, unfind the wrong ones.

“Why’d you stop?” Bill asks quietly.

Missy breathes out tensely next to her.

“It got dangerous,” the Doctor just says.

“Did you…” Bill says. “Did you get hurt or something?”

“No. Not us,” Missy answers.

Bill nods. She, too, doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Arthur seems to read her mind when comes to lick at them so they’ve something to do for a moment.

“And now you don’t want to… do it anymore. The going away.”

Her throat suddenly closes up with the thickness of exactly what she was looking for. A past, unraveled before her. Unveiled. She understands and she wishes she didn’t. Because now she knows she’s standing in the blank space someone else left behind.

“And you do, don’t you?” the Doctor says softly. She doesn’t look away from the wall, from the metal in her hands. She doesn’t look at Bill.

“Well…” Bill licks her lips. Her heart pounds, slow, in her chest. Adrenaline in a short circuit. “Yeah. I want a taste of it. Adventure, a bit of something new, something I have no way of ever seeing otherwise.” She holds Arthur in her lap, tracing long lines on his orange fur. “My daily life is not exactly satisfying, you know?”

She can hear the echo of blood in her cavities, pumping and returning. The sound it makes inside her eardrums, inside every vessel within her. She can feel herself exist infinitely, stretched over a second of uncertainty of the most intense caliber.

When nobody says anything, she decides to go on.

“Work to live, they tell you since you’re little. But it’s not like that at all. It’s live to work, and if you’re lucky, work to afford a few minutes of something you love in between. Mortgage, school, work, family… All that’s good in my life is friends I’m not all that close with and Heather, and Heather _actually_ likes that life. She likes going through all those normal stages of society one by one, _god_ knows why. And now I’m keeping this from her, because if I tell her, well, this isn’t _normal,_ is it? Even if all you do is give me lifts in time and all I do is wait for an alien invasion to fend off. I have no way to know how she’ll react.”

She’s a little breathless by the time she’s done, and that lets her realize that now both Missy and the Doctor have begun paying attention, if in their own subtle ways. It also makes her very aware of the fact that she may have just, a little bit, asked for things that they’re not ready to give her, on the basis that she expected them.

“We’re something like… friends now, aren’t we?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “So I just want to say that lifts in time is perfectly fine and all the sci-fi I need, even if it’s not all the sci-fi I might want. It’s just… do you think I should tell Heather? In case one day you’re ready to let all that sci-fi intensify?”

Missy merely smiles at her wording. She’s not going to share her opinion again and make of this a more public matter between them three.

Bill sits and waits for the Doctor’s take.

The Doctor…

The Doctor sighs.

In her long history of crash-landing where she shouldn’t, there’s always been a companion, almost waiting for her right where she needed them to be, and a family member, ready to join the action practically at the same time.

Rose had had Jackie, and Mickey, and her dad in versions of reality that once ruined it all. Martha tried and failed to keep it all from her family—Missy had ruined _that_ for everybody. Donna had had Wilfred, and they’d hidden it all from Sylvia until they hadn’t been able to anymore. And Amy and Rory had been a pack from the start.

So the only time anyone had ever come clean to a partner had been—

Clara… Clara had told Danny. Because she’d planned on living with him forever, and lies never work, not in the long run.

The Doctor looks at Bill now, even if her head is backwards from where she is on the floor.

“Sometimes… people can surprise you,” she says. She even manages a smile. “In my experience, even if they take it a bit off the first time round, they usually reconsider. It’s like you said. Nobody likes daily life once they know there’s more.”

Missy can’t help but feebly send rays of pride in her direction. She knows what it has cost the Doctor to say that in her own circumstances and encourage Bill to share everything with a loved one and thus expose them to the danger of this life, too. But she also knows something must be working, if the Doctor has recognized the value of expanding the tiny horizons of the bubble they’ve been living in for months into retaking the shape they used to have, before Clara. During Clara.

Now, the only problem she fears is, there’ll be more room for old demons, as well, to run free in whatever space is being created. Expansion never comes without a cost.

_But it’s worth it,_ Missy thinks. _For Bill._

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the two of them smile at each other. The human and the Time Lord who pretends she isn’t.

_And for that future Bill wants that the Doctor needs but can’t fight for alone._

There is room for old demons in that future, Missy knows this, she has always known that is where the road will lead once they eventually fix it up a little. Yet ahead, beyond the horizon that now rests a little too close to home, there will also be so much room for new and magnificent joys.

* * *

_Deep breath, come on._

She’s going to do it. She’s been standing in the hallway for five minutes now. She really is going to do it.

_How hard can it be? ‘Hello, Heather.’ No, that’s stupid. Who says hello these days to announce themselves into a room?_

Bill paces around, returning to the staircase. The smell in the hole between floors helps her think.

_‘I’m back! And I have news! Would you like to hear them? They’re very cool news. I have alien friends who travel in time. Who_ can _travel in time.’_

She slowly comes to place her head against a wall. She’s nowhere near as desperate as to hit it yet.

“Do I honestly think Heather— _my_ Heather—will dislike normal life if I tell her I know an alien cat named after King Arthur and two alien professors in my school? And a space- _and_ time-machine. And many stars, although that’s basically from class, she could know that if she came…”

But the question, the real question, is a different one. And she knows. It’s never been about what Heather will dislike or what she won’t dislike. That’s never mattered in this conversation Bill keeps having in her mind.

She removes her head from the wall.

Daily life bores her to bits, and it eats away all the good energy she really wants to have, and she has little hope for a future that every day seems a little bleaker. But this is no routine. This is every bit as risky as stepping into a pool of alien carnivore fish.

And, in fact, she is so aware she’s risking far more that she’s fooled herself into thinking it was about _Heather_ in the slightest.

Bill gets her keys out of her backpack and faces the door of the place where she’s built a life that society and its rules and normalcy can’t touch as long as she exists inside.

No, it’s not about Heather. It’s never been. Heather reacting one way or the other based on how she’s been raised isn’t the problem. Or the question. Or even the answer.

Bill’s just… afraid. Of being alone again in a world that likes her as little as she likes it. Of fighting battles again that aren’t battles, because ordinary human beings in daily life routines have no chances at ever winning them.

Bill is scared of standing in it with just her thoughts for company and not knowing how to avoid them this time. She’s scared of asking the question of whether or not there is ever an escape in this earth, in this country, when everything’s already chosen for her and deviating for the norm is entering another norm entirely. All roads are paved. Everything’s been discovered. And if there’s a future, she fears knowing already how humanity gets there.

A time machine could show her how right or wrong she is. A TARDIS could delay the moment she finds out.

But in the end it’s just Bill and a door.

_You really thought you were going to clobber some alien like in_ Independence Day _when the time came… You’re not even brave enough to open your own door!_

Her hand shakes when she picks out the right key. She laughs to herself, remembering an episode of some show in which the scratches on a surface somewhere were used as a clue to identify an alleged alcoholic. _Maybe the poor sod was just terrified._ That is her, right now, as she tries to get the key in and turn it.

In the end, pushing the door open is the easiest part.

She is locking it behind her, dropping her keys in the drawer by the wall, when Heather emerges out of her own bedroom.

“Hey,” Bill says. “I didn’t know you were already home.”

“Short shift today,” Heather says, straying from her quick route to the open kitchen to give Bill a chaste kiss on the lips. “The owner needed to close early.”

She opens one of the cabinets and puts one of the pans inside it on the stove. She leans for the fridge’s door with one hand, gets the stove heated with the other.

“Here, let me get that,” Bill says.

She gently pushes Heather towards the fridge so she can take care of the stove. No matter how long they’ve been living together and how often Bill’s told her, Heather always forgets to put butter on the pan before she heats it up. There’s already curls of smoke filling the room. She also turns it up a little too high.

Heather puts some eggs, ham and cheese on the counter and leans against it, next to Bill.

“I can do it,” she says, almost laughing. Bill’s never had any hope in her cooking, and it’s no secret by now. Heather’s never felt insulted by it, but Bill knows she does wish the task was a bit better distributed, like doing the dishes and dusting the furniture. “You’ve been in class all day, and I’ve been in my pajamas all day, watching telly.”

“It’s just a couple of omelets. You can clean up, after, if it makes you feel any better about over _working_ me after I’ve spent _so many hours_ nodding off in Mr. O’Connell’s dull lessons...” 

Heather snorts out a chuckle. “Yeah, okay.”

“And you can watch. Not that you need any permission, given that you already _are._ ” Bill’s voice is thick with amusement.

“Well, you’re very good with your hands. I might go ahead and learn something from how you proceed.”

“That’s just got to be the _worst_ pick-up line ever.”

“It’s not, I swear. I mean that. I can learn by watching you. You’re good.”

“You’re never gonna learn to cook with your eyes staring where they’re staring, Heather.”

“And you’re going to burn your omelet if you keep staring back, Ms. Potts. And then what?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Then it won’t just be me, the one with a bad cooking reputation.”

Heather begins a slow approach, induced only by the proximity of her face to Bill’s neck. Their bodies are not touching, but Heather’s breathing is loud, so close to Bill’s ears, and distracting when she’s trying to concentrate on something as precise as a pan and eggs.

She pushes Heather away with big, overly exaggerated gestures.

“You go… get the plates or something. Or I’m going to set the kitchen on fire. And then what?”

Heather giggles. She kisses Bill’s shoulder and moves away so she can collaborate in this plan they have that starts by not setting literal fires first and then by setting different fires, a little, later.

They end up having dinner in front of the TV, nooked and crammed into one another so much so that it’s a bit impossible to hold up a plate and eat. At first they just turned on the TV so they’d have some background noise, but it happened to show, completely randomly, a movie that mixed the two genres they each liked best. In the end, their initial flirting subsided and became comments about plot points and characters in something that is every bit like the love child of romance and science-fiction clichés.

Bill realizes, halfway across, when the last bits of her omelet have grown cold and dry on the coffee table, that there is no better moment to approach what she wanted approached earlier and then forgot about because Heather was being flirty.

Her chest burns hot at the sheer thought of telling the truth now, when some guy with very dog-like ears and eyes is revealing a space-themed adventure to an earth girl who turns out to not be a real earth girl and also simultaneously making puppy-eyes at her, pun intended. Maybe that will only make Heather believe her less.

But Heather clearly _loves_ this. This strange juxtaposition between the craziest tropes in space and fantasy, and a love story that makes absolutely zero sense. Heather loves those characters making puppy eyes at each other in the middle of the weirdest backgrounds. She loves it enough to dismiss those weirdest backgrounds.

And Bill loves her so much she believes that can also happen now, when she turns the volume down a little, looks her in the eye, and shares something even more special with her, makes her part of an adventure that Heather _deserves_ to belong in, too.

“Oh, for the love of—would you look at that?” Heather points at the screen. Bill isn’t even registering what’s happening on it. “In what world?” Heather yells at the characters, at the movie. She doesn't even yell antagonistically, she just says it to laugh at the absurdity she finds in it. “How anyone would believe that in real life, that’s beyond me.”

Bill fakes a short chuckle.

“Yeah, for sure. These movies are getting so unrealistic these days…”

She brings up the blanket to her chin and tries to breathe in deeply without Heather noticing. She makes herself small, and tries to remember that it doesn’t matter so much.

The Doctor and Missy, is that really such a big part of her life? Time travel is mostly just transportation for her at this point. And those two are just two more friends she has. So what if they’re alien? So what if the promise of _more_ hangs in the air because now Bill has opened the box that contained it?

Nothing’s going to happen.

So it’s okay that Heather doesn’t know. Heather doesn’t have to know everything, especially if she won’t understand, if she will be hurt by it. It’s not even a secret, it’s just… a part of Bill’s life that she hasn’t even _thought that hard_ about sharing, right?

“I mean, _seriously_ ,” Heather says. _“_ That guy’s not even evil, he’s just mostly theatrical on a spaceship. And I’m quite sure spaceships should move.”

Bill makes herself small underneath the blanket.

Whether this ever escalates or not, it’ll just be another part of her life she doesn’t talk to Heather about. Like never showing her old childhood haircuts that turned out to be too embarrassing (among other things) because Moira had taken her to a white hairdresser who didn’t know the first thing about what they were doing. And not talking about some things, that’s _fine._ That’s allowed. That’s not lying.

She’s just protecting herself.

And, if she wants to _lie_ to herself about this, then she’s also protecting Heather.

From what? Well, the lie hasn’t gotten her that far yet.

_That’s fine. I’ll just… tell my friends. Why should my girlfriend, who I live with, know about this? I’ll just tell all my other friends! It’ll be fine._

* * *

“Another one?”

The Doctor’s voice is a whisper in the night, barely even a breath, as torn from sleep as Missy’s.

“Yes.”

Missy turns on her side of the bed. This yellow bed in this yellow room that she never once thought would help her sleep. It’s yellow, orange, brown she dreams of. And red. Always that drenched color, running, streaming down cheeks, bodies, and cannons. She turns towards the Doctor, who has awakened as she has, and who is asking without saying the actual words.

The Doctor has long ago stopped asking. Missy never told her anything.

Instead, the Doctor breaches the invisible border in the middle of the bed, that trench on a mattress created out of air and worry. She moves closer, almost pressing her chest against Missy’s. The Doctor never changes out of her day clothes to get into bed, and hardly ever gets under the covers. That is hardly reproachable, there were days when the Doctor would refuse to so much as try to sleep, here or anywhere, and Missy would find her hunched over herself under the console room, finding her solace in wires and that hum that only exists in a TARDIS as old as she is. Now, the Doctor offers that same solace in the language that Missy understands best when words don’t suffice, and pulls her close into an embrace that never is.

The Doctor hugs to hide, but when her hand reaches over the middle of the bed, a trench between equals to join what she herself kept separate, it is an expression of truce, peace, and words she doesn’t say.

Her fingers hover over the two of them for a moment, before she finally lowers them to stroke Missy’s cheek. She doesn’t really need to say _any_ words. History has said them all for her, hinted at them, webbed them into impossible shapes. They are still two children in the throes of a long night, alone and scared, but they have each other, they have a hand to hold.

Missy covers the Doctor’s hand with her own, looking into her eyes. If only they’d known, all those many years ago, all those many _lives,_ that they would end up on a bed like this, fearing not the dark but what can grow out of it. She would have laughed, and the Doctor might only have left Gallifrey earlier, chasing solutions that never existed.

In the end, just like when they were children, there comes a time when one of them has to leave this union of two first and face the ghosts in the dark, in their heads. In their hearts.

Missy is the one to now, slowly. She rises from the bed and faces all of their ghosts for the both of them, her back turned to the Doctor—the greatest ghost of all.

She ends up in the kitchen, to fetch some water and some loneliness from yet another room that is empty of people when it shouldn’t be. In the olden days, the companion would stay on for days on end, avoiding life and duty. Now, the guest rooms are just ghost rooms that nobody walks into anymore.

Missy drinks a little and sits on a counter. She’s very behind on her plan. Every time she thinks about how close she is to getting it right and how lost she actually might be, her head hurts in three different places, and all she can do it stare at a machine that can’t get her where she wants to go unless she finds out how soon. She is still going to walk across empty corridors, past empty rooms. Some of them continue to bear the weight of the last of Clara’s possessions.

And Clara’s a long way away, unable to return. So far away, so impossibly lost to the Doctor, that it’s destroying the reality of this TARDIS, this beautiful existence that took over the hearts and minds of people who otherwise would have never believed in something as crazy, as stupid, and as wonderful as a mad Time Lord with a blue box.

Missy’s losing that Time Lord to _the_ Time Lords and their ego. History does repeat itself.

She closes her eyes. Her head is beginning to hurt again. She rubs at her forehead to try and ease the pain before it comes to its fullest power.

And then… she hears music.

How can she not drop the incipient sparks of a headache and her pointless attempts to stop it in order to follow?

She ambles in the dark until she locates the source. She doesn’t even need to go very far. Here, there, one corridor down, left, two lefts, a right. When she can hear it as if she was right next to it, because the door’s open, she stands by and lets the sounds guide her inside.

The Doctor’s leaning on the piano— _in_ the so-called piano room, because it’s in the middle of it; no one ever said she was original when naming rooms. She’s so close to the actual instrument, so perfectly placed by it, that Missy’s convinced it’s an invitation. Her suspenders are down, and in their stead, the strand of the electric guitar spans over her chest like a promise crossing her hearts.

Whatever she’s playing, head down, her hair falling and moving as her fingers do, it’s without a care in the world, probably without even realizing Missy’s watching her. Missy can’t recognize the song this time, it must be her own work.

That makes it a thousand times more beautiful. And it hurts a thousand times more as Missy walks right into it, the room with the Doctor’s music.

She doesn’t get noticed until she literally almost coils herself into the Doctor’s space like a snake about to pounce, face to face, both hands spread around the Doctor, tightly supported on the piano’s edge as if she was holding on for dear life.

“Why do you like playing alone, Doctor?” Missy whispers. “I might’ve thought you would enjoy your audience.”

“Oh, some things one’s meant to do by oneself…” The Doctor replies. She looks up at Missy past the blond strands of hair getting in their way, but she doesn’t stop playing—softer this time. “And no one’s ever liked me and my guitar. Too noisy, they said.”

“ _Who_ said?” Missy says, leaning a little bit in to kiss her cheek. “Who called the Doctor noisy?”

But the butt of the joke is that no one has, because the Doctor only yells in openness, with her audience, with an interlocutor present. Alone in dark rooms, the Doctor sleeps. And watching her is watching silence spread and questions grow larger, unanswerable.

Missy recoils a bit, away from the scent of music and silence, coexisting as one in the same person, and sits at the piano. She lifts the fall board.

“Mind if I…?” She wiggles her fingers over the keys.

A small shadow moves in Missy’s peripheral vision, jumping on the bench, then over to the keys, playing the cacophony that fills rooms with mystery and quietude at the same time. Dissonance.

“I think Arthur does,” the Doctor says.

Missy passes a hand over the cat’s long back as the Doctor begins strumming a few chords of _The Aristocats_ theme, interrupting her own song. She smiles too, that smile that reaches her full face, that smile that’s all teeth and lines around her mouth, that smile that makes Missy’s hearts dance in her chest instead of just beat like they’re supposed to.

The Doctor picks up Arthur up from the keyboard, his paws dangling in the air as if he adamantly refuses, and thus lets Missy play. At first, she sounds hesitant, but the more she plays, the more confident every note gets. The Doctor recognizes it as her own melody, a melody that wasn’t Missy’s to begin with. She can’t believe Missy was listening intently enough to replicate it on such a different instrument and with such care.

“What’s it called?” Missy says.

Setting Arthur back on the floor to roam free, the Doctor joins her, the chords a little faster than first intended. They play together, perfectly complemented even though they have never tried to duo before. The Doctor didn’t know Missy could play piano like this, like she was born to, like her simple shadow would outdo the brightest musicians of human history.

After a little while, the Doctor exhales.

“I think that it’s called… Clara.”

Missy’s fingers hover above keys that they never quite get to touch now.

“I think it’s time now, Doctor,” she says, her voice serious. She has been meaning to say this for a while now. She remembers Bill’s questions to her, and her own answer. There’s no moment like the present and no person like herself to know it. “Everything’s less terrible. And Bill… You saw how much she aches for what’s out there.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” The Doctor removes the strand of the guitar off her shoulder and puts the instrument down carefully by the piano.

“You can’t gauge that if you’re not actually there to analyze all the angles of it in action.” When the Doctor doesn’t reply, Missy presses on. “They can’t be everywhere. They won’t be, waiting for you so they can trap you again. They already have you where they want you. Don’t give them anything more than what they have already taken.”

“I’m not giving them anything. I’m not giving them _any_ one else. And I’m not giving them me.” The Doctor stands up straight and further away from the piano she had been leaning on. “Those are the rules. If that’s too hard for you to understand now, because you still crave their validation after so long, then I’m sorry. But it’s not going to come. Ever. And it never was. So let me do this my way.”

She begins to stomp away, every step an ode to her anger, to her grief. Missy doesn’t even get up and follow her.

“And what is your way, Doctor?” she speaks up instead, not even angrily, not even firmly. She is too tired to try to play emotional games with her. “Is this really how you end? The war you won wins over you? I never once thought I’d see you _stop_ doing what you love, what is essentially your livelihood _,_ because of something as fragile as fear of that war.”

The Doctor turns back to face her.

“You think I _fear_ that war? You think I couldn’t sneak in there and destroy them again? Who do you think the Doctor is, Missy? Who do you think _I_ am?” There is rage in the same spot she inhabits, in her pacing, in her not coming closer because if she does there will be violence, the one she’s never fallen prey to, even when Missy had. “I fear the Time Lords I saved, and I fear what they will do to the people I love just so they can have a Doctor among them again, freeing them from the only thing that’s keeping them from taking that bloody old war to the next level. Nothing survives that next level, not the universe, not us. I fear what I will do, to make it all right again. And I fear _you,_ stuck in here with me, telling me one thing and doing the opposite yourself.” The Doctor’s lungs hiss when she takes in much-needed air. “What do you dream about, Missy?”

Missy just regards her for a moment, a long moment. Gentle and understanding, she doesn’t look like the Master. She hasn’t in a very long time, but now less than ever. Almost nothing at all in her now resembles the pain and rage in the hearts that beat alongside the noise in her head that she lost to gain her old friend back… as well as herself. Her pain now is raw and tender, it doesn’t burn in agony like stars under the hateful touch of a raging Time Lord.

“Take Bill on a trip,” she just says, softly. “You have been cooped down here for too long. You’ve forgotten you can _run._ ”

The Doctor walks to the stairs that lead to the small storeroom under the piano room. She shackles her hands on the handrail, shaking it up. That, too, is cacophonous.

“I don’t want to run! I’m so _tired_ of running….”

When Missy’s fingers return to the piano, the Doctor listens. The Doctor quietens. She speaks so many languages, she understands the way of them is to let them play first. Especially when, like right now, she’s too lost for words herself.

After so many years coming and going to the many times and places of this planet called Earth, the Doctor recognizes the message in the chords Missy glides through, without need to hear the lyrics being sung.

_Come away with me in the night_

_Come away with me_

_And I will write you a song_

_Come away with me on a bus_

_Come away where they can’t tempt us, with their lies_

“Then don’t think about it as running,” Missy says. “Think about it as going somewhere. With someone. To do something.”

“Vague much?” the Doctor says, obviously meaning to come across as grumpy and tired, Missy can tell. But the truth is that those two words sound more amused than anything else.

_And I want to walk with you_

_On a cloudy day_

_In fields where the yellow grass grows knee-high_

_So won’t you try to come_

The song ceases to be before the mention of a kiss in the lyrics never sung. The Doctor notices. That is the door that is never crossed with the two of them, because she asked, because Missy, too, knows to listen.

Missy’s hands rest on her lap when she addresses the Doctor again.

“Travel with me. Travel with Bill, who might even need it more than us.” She tries to laugh. “Imagine a whole life, short as a human lifespan is, still. Imagine never being able to _see._ Just filling their days with work, food, sleep, and the occasional bout of fun. Wouldn’t you ache?”

It’s a trap question.

The Doctor ached, even on Gallifrey, with time machines and civilization beyond anyone’s dreams. The Doctor ached so much she ran away and never stopped running once she’d seen the vortex and grown to understand what it meant.

“She has us. Nothing will happen. I’ll keep her safe, I’ll be her personal guard. But please…” Missy begs now. “Please, let’s leave Earth behind. See what makes Bill ache.”

_And allow ourselves to ache again through her._

“Alright… One adventure. Just to see, just to… try,” the Doctor mutters in barely anything that registers as audible, all the way from the handrail.

She comes back, then. She sits on the bench, so close to Missy that depending on who decides these days, one could say she’s almost on Missy’s lap. Missy doesn’t need and doesn’t care to know, she just puts an arm around the Doctor.

“Sorry I shouted at you…”

“I forgive you,” Missy says, pulling her a bit closer, to her shoulder so she can rest there. After a while, she says: “You’re hurting. I remember how that felt. And I remember what you told me.”

“I don’t see how striving to be good, do good, will help in this situation.”

“I don’t mean that,” Missy says quietly, her fingers buried in the Doctor’s hair. “I mean… even at my worst, you still rooted for me. You still wouldn’t give up on me. You held me once and forgave me. By this I don’t mean to please shout at me again, although there’s scenarios for everything—” She giggles at the innuendo. “—but… rather that it’s my turn. And that you’re nowhere as close to damnation as you think. And, deep down, yes.”

“Yes, what?” the Doctor says softly.

Missy shifts a bit on her seat so she can look the Doctor in the eye.

“Yes, I do think you’re still striving to do good, to do your best. But I don’t think it’s helping. Nothing helps during a Time War. Except putting an end to it.” Then, more gently, more to herself, she adds. “Or running.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First things first: Arthur, the alien cat, is for Arthur, of course. The one and only. May he live long and prosper <3
> 
> “Things that happened once […] Things that may still come to pass someday.” Big _Lord of the Ring_ vibes here, mimicking Galadriel’s line, _…things that were… things that are… and some things… that have not yet come to pass._
> 
> “Bojangles McDuff” is that sort of [thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvIvzbhx68s&ab_channel=TheLateLateShowwithJamesCorden) you can’t believe you’ve heard and now you can’t forget.
> 
> “[...] remembering an episode of some show in which the scratches on a surface somewhere were used as a clue to identify an alleged alcoholic” _Sherlock_ reference from way back when!
> 
> Even though I have not seen it, the movie Bill and Heather are watching is supposed to be _Jupiter Ascending_ by The Wachowski sisters.
> 
> “[...] there will be violence” is from _Game of Thrones_ , one of my favorite Cersei Lannister lines.
> 
> The song Missy plays on the piano is _Come Away With Me_ by Norah Jones.


	8. Those left unburied

A corner is turned when seconds before she could only see a corridor stretching forever into dimensional nothingness.

Bill sees her, then, bathed in suspended light. The TARDIS is dim, all the time. Atmospherically dim. But right now there’s a woman in a red dress with a black collar right in front of her, and she’s standing in a ray of something solar, something almost alive and bright that the TARDIS must have reserved specially for her.

“Hello?” Bill says.

The woman steps out of the light. And in the dimness, Bill’s breath catches. She hasn’t seen that face in—

“Bill?” the woman says, just as confused as she is. “Bill Potts? From Coal Hill?”

* * *

The sun is shining, although that never lasts long. The air smells fresh, although it’s fall and it shouldn’t. And Bill ran so late for her first class of the morning she looked at the professor drone on from outside the corridor, shook her head, and walked past the door into General Astronomy instead.

When she sat down somewhere in the back rows, Missy and the Doctor were standing up on the auditorium’s platform as if it was a stage and bickering loudly about planet inhabitability like two professors might argue about their contradicting theories on their respective published papers.

Bill took a lot of notes and laughed to herself at the fact that most days their classes deal more with alien life than they ever do with the outer space beyond. Not that anyone else has really noticed or complained.

After class is dismissed and she’s gathering her things (this is actually one of the few classes she does have paper and pen out to take notes, since she figures and hopes they might come in handy one day), a friend of a friend, Leo (if she’s remembering correctly), a black kid that’s barely eighteen and also definitely not enrolled in the class either, bumps into her and smiles instead of saying hello or stopping to chat.

She notices his ‘aliens are real’ t-shirt and something in her almost pushes her to go after him and try to start a conversation. This could be the right person to talk to.

_Or maybe it’s just an ironic t-shirt_ , she reminds herself. _People do that, wear t-shirts that are supposed to be funny._

She watches the rest of the room slowly empty. People don’t take any of this stuff seriously, even the stuff that is legit. It’s just a story to them. She supposes it’s because of the distance. She felt the same way in high school about geology. How could she ever care about the depth of the mantle of the Earth? What was it to her? Or about micrometers. She remembers cringing at microdistances. Now, she wonders if there’s any way to shrink down a TARDIS, already a stratospherically weird piece of engineering, and travel through dimensions already too small to even be conceivable to the human mind, just like she might travel though space—the dimension that is too big to conceive it properly.

In her absent-mindness, Bill almost misses the cute little wave, supposedly meant to be subtle, that Missy does to get her attention all the way from the platform.

The Doctor is nowhere near as delicate.

“Oi, Bill!” she says.

Missy makes incoherent shushing sounds at her.

“Wasn’t I obviously trying not to draw attention to ourselves and the fact that we’re _talking_ to her?” she tells the Doctor, her face a perfection depiction of puzzlement and annoyed coexistence.

The room is empty now anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re playing by the rules of subtlety.

In spite of that, Bill can’t help to feel the amusement wave that shakes through her like a small earthquake.

“Yeah?” she yells across the room. It is only through doing that she realizes how wide it is and how tiny the Doctor and Missy look on the other side of it.

Even when she’s approaching the platform, they remain small, up there, distant like moons.

“How’d you feel about a trip?” the Doctor says.

Bill has to stop and reassess what her brain has just processed as words, so she can individually recreate the string of a sentence and go on walking.

She remains where she is, unable to do either. All she hears is the word ‘trip’ in a loop. And the image she keeps dreaming of. A blue box and stars, her own hand reaching out to touch them.

“Really?” she says. Loud and almost shakily. Whoever hears this might think they’re either rehearsing a very weird play or she’s just been told she’s flunked a subject.

The Doctor shuts down the computer and the projector as Missy leaps down the little platform, not bothering to take the stairs. The sound echoes off every wall.

When they’re both on solid, normal floor, Bill stands in front of them, wordless, speechless, her eyes almost welling up with excitement.

“You’re serious? You wanna do this?” she asks them. “And not just because I asked?”

The Doctor shrugs, hands in her pockets.

“It was about time,” she says.

But her expression doesn’t mirror the joy in Bill’s face. She maintains the calm, the stone-like calm that says more than just that. It murmurs façade at the world, façade and fear. Not just as a reflection of what’s inside her, but what she will inspire in others if they do not listen.

“One trip,” she continues. “Somewhere without danger, without consequences. Then we will see, alright?”

“That’s enough. For me,” Bill rushes to say. “That’s more than enough. Thank you.”

“One trip and then we’ll see,” Missy says, adding in a half-smile to a statement that does feel like swallowing a stone. A small, round stone, yet rock all the same. Rock that sits in a stomach and never passes.

She offers them both, the Doctor and Bill, her arms to take.

“So, shall we?”

Once upstairs, they waste no time. They lock the office door behind them, just in case, and make sure that Arthur is in the TARDIS they’re taking, but let him roam in peace.

For the first time, Bill can feel the hum of the machine as something else, something alive that vibrates with promises, with direction. She can breathe it as if it were air. And nothing has really changed yet, no number has been entered into any keypad, nothing has been said. It’s still the same TARDIS where she hangs out most of the time.

That’s the magic.

She doesn’t even try to hold back, and just pulls the Doctor into a hug. She knows Missy would have taken her away long ago, but she also knows Missy doesn’t do that alone. They are a union of two, in more ways than one.

“What’s that for?” the Doctor says, not pulling back, but a bit unsure as to how hug back.

“Just let it happen,” Bill says, laughing.

When the hug’s over, the Doctor eyes Bill with strangeness. They haven’t known each other that long, but since when has time mattered to her, to the Doctor, the lord of time? She’s used to attachments, to jumping around getting them to people she’s just met. She’s used to people getting attached to _her_ first. It’s just… a gust of new wind, to have it happen again, like this, like nothing had changed, when she was striving harder than ever to keep it from happening.

She stands by her console, by the world she knows well and had to abandon.

“So, where are we going?” she asks, ever the driver, the pilot, the one who never decides the where or the when because external circumstance always gets in the way, mostly because she used to like to see the faces of people when she took them where they longed to be.

“Anywhere you might think of, we can go,” Missy says, lounging on her chair. “Any requests, dear?”

“Gah, I don’t know. So much to consider. All those variables. It’s all so _vast._ ”

Missy laughs with the knowledgeable experience of someone who’s been around long enough to think it _small._

“Let me narrow it down a bit for you. Past, future? Earth, universe?”

Bill seems to vibrate on the spot, an earthquake on her own.

“Future,” she says. “Universe!”

“Good. The TARDIS’ll do the rest. I’ve put her on easy mode—”

“You’ve _what_?” The Doctor’s head turns to Missy.

Missy sighs dramatically on her chair.

“Will she even remember how to do this, I wonder?” she says. “It’s been so very long.”

“’Course she will. She’s a time machine. Time doesn’t pass for her. Yesterday and tomorrow and today, they’re the same if you experience it all at the same time, if you can access it all simultaneously.” The Doctor sighs in delight at the thought. “Oh, what a life that must be.”

“I didn’t mean her, I meant you,” Missy says, her voice a tiny bit quieter, a tiny bit less jokingly.

The awkward silence gets stuck in all their throats like a big lunch. Bill thinks it might stay there long enough to make her forget why today might just be the best day of her life, but then she _remembers_ all over again and feels a bit like children on TV when it’s a major holiday and they can get up late and have hot chocolate for breakfast and watch cartoons all morning.

She skips around in excitement towards the opening that leads away from the console room.

“I’m going to go find the bathroom, yeah? Wouldn’t want to try and have to find a toilet out there in space.”

Not that navigating the TARDIS interior design in search for a bathroom is an easy task, but at least she knows there is a toilet somewhere around and not very far away from the entrance. She was given directions once, on the first day or so, she’s just forgotten them more often than she’s remembered them.

Despite her traveling enthusiasm, she makes it there okay, unlike that one time when she somehow ended up in the library. Even when being a good distance away, because of the piping or because of some alien disposition of the walls, she can still hear Missy and the Doctor bickering about something.

She smiles to herself. They really are a bit like the stereotype of old married couples who have been living together for too long to care anymore about being seen as sweet, even if deep down they are. Bill wonders if she and Heather will ever get to that point. They aren’t even on marriage terms. They _can’t_ be, with all the secrets. But she daydreams about it, when she sees Missy and the Doctor—that point in personal history when you bicker because you love each other and you’ve run out of ways to _say_ it, so you toe around it and express it with your face instead. She sees it often enough, she knows she could do it. She knows what her face might look like if she did, every bit like Missy’s. Longing, caring when no one’s looking, and then every shade of teasing when Heather did look.

Bill flushes the toilet and leaves, following the sound of those two bickering idiots. If their alien species have the construct of marriage and romantic love or not, Bill doesn’t even need to know. She’s been around them, she’s watched them _care_ about each other with an intensity that precedes and succeeds all of that. She calls it love in her head and relates to it regardless, because in her language, in the constructions of her species and society, there are no other names for it. Only love, and whatever adjective people might find applies as its companion.

They are close enough now, they sound as if they are, but Bill is staring at a wall, not the entrance back to the console room.

“Yeah, that definitely wasn’t there before,” she speaks aloud.

To be honest with herself, the wall probably was there before, and she just took a wrong detour while she thought about relationships and dipped herself in a daydream of marriage. But it’s very terrible luck that they’re so close and there’s a wall cutting her off.

Somewhere in the many sounds of the TARDIS ambience, Bill hears a soft tolling of bells that she doesn’t know how to interpret. She just turns back to try and find another way, another corridor. Because in her head, there has to be.

This occurrence, getting lost where people might usually _not,_ doesn’t disrupt her much. It would constitute a problem in the long run if she was running late for something, which she isn’t. Or if she was actually _lost_ and not a little bit confused out of place.

Besides, her friends will go looking for her if enough time passes. They wouldn’t just leave her in the belly of the beast and wait. She’s not even worried, she’s not even _relieved_ that she isn’t.

It’s just steps she has to take. Steps that echo sometimes, because the floor is a type of metal. And steps that sometimes make no sound, because the floor might be metal, but a carpety one.

If she goes all the way forward, until there’s more than just doors opening at either side, something’s bound to appear that she recognizes. And she’s not about to just _open_ doors or peek into them. That’s too much like the equivalent of going to someone’s house and, on the way back from the bathroom, stopping by a bedroom to gossip around what the houseowners keep there. Literally. Whatever questions flutter in her about the Doctor and Missy, that is no way to satisfy any sort of curiosity.

Yet minutes pass, and she doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be an _anywhere_ to go, simply the here, a here that continues infinitely. Bill’s brain begins to turn, begins to throw words at her from stories and movies.

Dilation. Of space, of time. Maybe both. And she might be trapped in it, a moment that overlaps the boundary of other moments and never stops doing so.

If the TARDIS is a sentient dimension, could she do such a thing? Could she show her ways that aren’t there? Manipulate herself into shapes, into new corridors and rooms? A living labyrinth, essentially.

Could the TARDIS trap someone inside at will? And what for?

Bill would very much prefer to think she’s just gotten lost. It happens. She usually finds her way back and pretends it’s all good. She could do that now.

A tiny little meow coming from one of the doors calls to her.

“And what are _you_ doing here?” she calls back.

Arthur pushes a half-opened door to waddle her way, staring up attentively, questioning things she has no words for. Cats are already inquisitive and mysterious, and this is no ordinary cat, per se.

“I’m going to go ahead and assume I’m not trapped, if you’re here,” she says to him. “She would have trapped me alone, wouldn’t she?”

She doesn’t notice that she’s talking of the cat and the TARDIS the way the Doctor does. She has been for a while now _._

“What’s the fun of a trap otherwise?” she goes on.

Arthur just stares. He has no answers and no questions for her. He just exists alongside her. The Doctor never did discover what language his species spoke, if they spoke any. And he doesn’t really meow much or make any noises if he can help it. She thinks right now might just be the first time she’s heard him do so.

“No, I don’t suppose you’d know, would you?” Bill laughs. “Want to come with me?”

The cat blinks slowly at the words. And when she begins to motion as if she was to walk forward, he follows disinterestedly. Whether he knows where he is or not, it doesn’t matter to him. He goes on either way, forward with her.

She talks to him sometime to fill the silence, when she loses track of time. He’s well behaved, and listens, perks up his head and stops when she does. He’s good company that she’s grateful for.

Sometimes, noises creak alongside the eternal ship, and Arthur’s ears signal what he can’t otherwise. Bill picks him up, then, in her arms. He lets her, he’s always let her, even when he didn’t trust anyone else. This small alien that doesn’t understand Earth or Earthlings trusts her, and she trusts him. She trusted him a bit, before he was a cat. That’s why she could catch him.

“What’d you reckon?” she tells him now, before the corridor changes. Her fingers find the cat, and the cat finds comfort in the touch of her. Companionship in a darkness that isn’t only metaphorical. “Getting more lost? Getting less lost?”

The corridor doesn’t change slowly. It groans like a living thing and the metal and the energy come to existence at once. Bill finds herself staring at something that wasn’t there, wall or no wall. She finds a piece of the TARDIS that she feels is more familiar than the endless stretch she’s been on so far.

And she sees _yellow._

Arthur leaps out of her arms into the room that exudes that color without even having it on the door. He disappears past the entrance, too quick for her to stop.

Bill calls his name. She still doesn’t think it’s a good idea, to sneak in if no one told her to. But Arthur doesn’t meow back or return by her side, and she isn’t leaving him behind in case something strange traps him alone here.

“Arthur, come on, buddy…” she mutters.

She puts a hand on the door. It’s got a strange feel to it, surreal and other-worldly, like it doesn’t even belong on here. She pushes it slowly.

Yellow. It’s all yellow.

Walls, ceiling, furniture. Darker hues, softer pastels. But yellow. Combined into a room that breathes like a dying sun. Even a painting of a sunflower on orange and beige hangs high over the bed.

Arthur’s burrowed himself onto the mattress, among used and wrinkled sheets.

“Get out of there!” she tells him, trying to fish him out. But he’s stubborn and slippery if he means to be.

Used sheets…

Bill realizes, belatedly, what that means. She sees, too, a dark purple parasol forgotten in a corner, the pile of laundry on the desk. A nightgown, white and ordinary. A few shirts, a waistcoat, a velvety jacket. On the desk, atop the clothes, a physics book lies. And hanging from the desk chair, a bra.

“Arthur!” she tries again.

She tries to stop looking around.

This is where they live. This is the room where they come, when the school is empty, and their hearts are quiet, and Bill is gone. This is their smallest measure of home.

She wants to _see_ everything. To know. They hide corners of themselves from her. They do so because they’re afraid, because perhaps they think she can’t handle it. And she wishes respecting that was as easy as pulling a curtain and forgetting. Especially now.

“Arthur…” she says.

Even in a room as deeply impersonal as this one, only with used covers and clothes to clutter up the space, Bill can feel the presence of what they hide.

Gently, she approaches the bed and finally struggles to free the cat from the bundle of sheets. This is none of her business until they’re the ones to let her in. The cat fights her for a while, comfortable and warm, but they shouldn’t be here. And she’s not going to be. Besides, it’s all too yellow, it hurts her eyes.

After that, she holds on tight to Arthur, and does her best not to imagine the life two aliens might have, trapped in a TARDIS, with the whole of Earth to explore. She tries not to imagine why they remain there.

“They said they’d lost someone,” she tells Arthur, absent-mindedly. It’s better than talking to herself. “No… No, they didn’t. They said someone got hurt.” She sighs and walking away takes the air from her. “Maybe it hurt too much to go on alone.”

Bill grew up an orphan in a foster home, lonely but never alone. She knows the other side of that coin. Sometimes, it hurts too much, too dryly, for you to be able to do anything but just move on in whatever direction and hope one day it’ll lead you where you need to go.

“Maybe they hurt too much to go anywhere at all…” she tells Arthur.

Sometimes going nowhere is better than getting lost.

And right now, in a more literal understanding of that, she’s not sure which is which for her situation.

On and on, around and around. This wall connecting to this wall. Sense stops making itself after some time, after Bill’s decided that she has been trapped into a sentient labyrinth that knows more about direction than she ever will. So she’s just been taking steps, she’s been mumbling things to Arthur she doesn’t very well remember saying if it’s been long enough. Not that long enough is a measure of time she can decipher now. On and on, around and around.

This is all she knows.

Until what she knows switches into a new dimension, as it could not be any other way. The corridor stretches and molds, and a new one appears where before there was only dimness.

The TARDIS is dim all the time. Atmospherically dim. And yet right now a woman in a red dress with a black collar is standing right in front of Bill in a ray of the most beautiful light, something almost alive and bright that the TARDIS must have reserved specially for her.

Bill feels a little bit like they’re both as bathed in suspended light as they are in suspended time.

“Hello?” Bill says.

The woman steps out of the light. And in the dimness, Bill’s breath catches.

“Bill?” the woman says, just as confused as she is. “Bill Potts? From Coal Hill?”

“Ms. _Oswald_?”

Somehow, that doesn’t ring like the right thing to ask to Bill, who remembers very well leaving for the summer and returning next year to find that English had been taken over by someone who didn’t speak about Jane Austen with utmost reverence. She wishes she had a better reaction for this moment, but in this light she’s still the teenager who lost a teacher to time and never knew.

“Oh my god, it really is you,” Clara says breathily, clasping her hands to her mouth.

She paces right where she stands, legs standing a bit apart, just like Bill remembers years ago. But Clara should be older now, by a few years, enough for them to show.

“Did the Doctor do something, the idiot?” Clara goes on. “Of course he did, didn’t he?” She stomps a bit on the metal floor. “Oh, I’m going to _kill_ him. Where has that man gone off to now?”

“I’m sorry?” Bill says. She can feel her eyes opening as wide as they go. _Him?_ Suddenly, a few conversations she’s heard about gender click in her head.

“Well, he’s not a man. Not sure about that. I’m not even sure he’s sure. Probably not, knowing him. But he does go off more often than not, and always when you least expect him to.” Clara realizes she’s rambling and takes a good look at Bill. She has to stand on her tiptoes in order to really do so, she’s so much shorter than Bill remembered. “How did he get you here? How did he even realize you exist? The Doctor doesn’t even know I have a proper job. He still thinks I nanny for a living.”

“How did _you_ get here?” Bill asks. Her braincells are beginning to jumble all together. And she’s beginning to very much like her time dilation theory. She saw, in the past—in a past version of this TARDIS, at least—those little notebook thingies Clara made the little ones do homework on at school. Which means… “Are you traveling with…” It takes Bill a bit of effort to fluidly move from the pronouns she’s used to using for the Doctor into the pronouns Clara uses. “…him?”

“At the moment I’m _yelling at him for losing me in here,_ ” Clara says to the corridor. She then turns back to Bill, crossing her arms. “Are _you_ traveling with him? You can’t be traveling with him, you’re—”

Bill smirks, crossing her arms as well.

“An adult now, Ms. Oswald. He really didn’t grab me from anywhere. I’m guessing the Doctor I know is a bit… different than the Doctor _you_ know.”

Although, if she also lost Clara in the TARDIS once, not that different.

Clara frowns for a moment. She observes, quietly taking in the new sight of Bill, more grown, more refined around the edges than in her time.

“Past or future?” she asks Bill after a minute or two of some observation.

“What’d you mean?”

“What does he call himself? What’s the number?”

“What number?”

“He’s not going by any number? That’s proper weird, now.”

“What’s your number?” Bill asks after a beat.

“Eleven.”

There it is again, that soft tolling from the beginning. Clara immediately turns around, almost does a full twirl. The few loose strands of her bun move exactly the way her hair did when Bill was in school, like she was jumping on elastic fabric that propelled her everywhere at once. Like her hair was chewing gum, stretchy, slinky magic.

“Alright, so is that like a nickname or something? Like in _Stranger Things_?”

Clara just stares at her.

“Right, you don’t—you’re from way back when,” Bill stutters when she realizes.

“So what’s he like? In the future? Am I still there?” Clara asks, smug.

Bill stops to think for a moment. Time travel has many, many perks. Yet she feels, somehow, that right now she’s standing right in the middle of one of its disadvantages. If she tells the truth, however little she may now, wouldn’t she be creating a window into Clara’s own personal future? Wouldn’t she be _disrupting_ it, perhaps, by doing that?

And why has the Doctor changed so drastically? She and Missy have talked about gender often enough. But is it in the same terms as Bill knows them? Will Bill be doing something wrong—outing the Doctor she knows in some manner—by telling Clara now?

“I don’t think he has, no, if we’re both trapped in here,” she says, smiling lopsidedly as she voices a thought she’s pretty sure Clara shares. “We should really try and find a way back soon, before either of him worries?”

That shouldn’t make sense and weirdly it does.

Clara laughs with her.

“It’s this bloody TARDIS. She really doesn’t like me. She thinks I’m stealing him away or something.”

Bill chuckles. Their footsteps echo now in the empty corridor. Arthur presses himself, half-asleep and bored, into her arms.

“Mr. Pink must be _thrilled,_ ” she half-mutters.

“Sorry, what?” Clara says. Her tone implies that she either didn’t catch it or did but didn’t understand what Bill said.

This must be a Clara _before_ Danny Pink, math teacher extraordinaire and terrible flirt. Everyone in the school said so, they would gather by corners to watch him try to talk to Clara.

“Does she—um—like you?” Clara asks. “The TARDIS?”

Bill passes a hand over a wall. It’s alive. So alive, breathing somehow, the hum almost as present as her lungs beneath her own chest. It’s an essence she would never know how to describe. It’s… warm. Nonthreateningly so.

“I don’t know. But I like her,” she says. And she tries to mean it, just in case the TARDIS can hear. She finds that, after all, she doesn’t have to try very hard. “I feel really lucky that I get to do this. Getting lost in the corridors notwithstanding and all.”

“And how’s life? What did you grow up to do?”

Even though it’s just conversation to fill time, it’s better than talking to a cat that seems a lot happier with her not addressing him directly. And Bill is aware of the fact that she’s crossing probably a timeline she shouldn’t by doing this, so she treads lightly over a ground of old questions she keeps asking in a loop in her head because she can’t ask them out loud. Not now, not ever. Least of all to the Doctor, who might actually, positively know the answers.

“Graduated high school to go to college.”

“Where? Somewhere nice?”

Clara’s footsteps are as lively on the floor as her words.

“Yeah. Bristol,” Bill says. “And I guess… I did the whole girlfriend thing. _Am_ doing it. Her name’s Heather.”

“Are you happy?” Clara asks, casually. As if that was just what you do, when you meet up with someone you used to know. Some coffee, maybe some chips, the sea behind you. And that inquiry. She laughs softly. “Sorry, it’s just… I wonder about that. With all my kids, you know? You all go off into the world and I never see you again. And I’m left behind wondering if you’re happy in the lives you’ve chosen for yourselves.”

_What happened to you, Ms. Oswald?_ Bill wants to tell her. Bill wants to stop her, look her in the eye, and ask her something she knows Clara can’t answer, because she doesn’t know either. Not this Clara. Not yet.

Time has meddled before-time.

_Where did you go?_

“Yeah, I’m happy, I suppose,” Bill says instead. She looks down at her hands, at Arthur. Anything but the ghost of the woman right next to her. “I’ve got the Doctor.”

Clara laughs, but it sounds almost too much like a sigh.

“He does that, doesn’t he?”

They walk in silence after that. Those words sit heavy in Bill’s heart. In her time, the Doctor is a window to something she can’t quite put her finger on. But it’s not happiness, it’s not even sparks of joy. it’s something like hope, but denser, thicker around the edges. Honey without the sweetness. The Doctor is Bill’s chance, perhaps. Of doing something else that isn’t just the life someone else _chose_ for her.

And she has just heard that once upon a time, the Doctor did more than just open windows. Once, the Doctor was the entire air someone else breathed.

Bill wonders how that felt. If Missy was around, then. And if that’s the reason. The reason for everything these days.

_When, Ms. Oswald?_ Bill wonders.

It has taken her a long time to arrive to the right question.

_When did you disappear?_ Bill was a teenager the last time she saw Clara, a teacher in her thirties who made puppy eyes at the math teacher and had high heels that clicked on the floor tile faster than you’d believe. But she knows time now, she knows the spaces it leaves, the spaces it lets you inhabit. _When you disappeared, how old were you, really? When did all of that happen for you?_ _How many years from now will it happen?_

The soft tolling this time is sadder than it is soft, and Bill agrees with it. Time machines are sometimes too much like doors to the past where the dead are walking among you and you don’t even know until you’re face to face with one.

_Did you die, Ms. Oswald?_

“Hey, did you see that?” Clara says.

“See what?” Bill says. She emerges out of her own head to realize the corridors have changed. They look infinitely older, they even smell as if centuries had skipped their turn here. Even the few doors to rooms that are closed have switched to materials that seem worn and eroded.

“I don’t know,” Clara whispers. “I thought I saw something.”

“Maybe someone else is in here,” Bill whispers back.

“Maybe it’s just a shadow or something. This place is starting to grate on my nerves…”

Bill smiles to herself. Clara Oswald didn’t precisely have nerves of steel back in the day.

They approach the corner where she thought she’d seen something move and find a door that not only is unlocked, but slightly ajar.

Three types of doors exist in this TARDIS. Those that are entire open for the passerby to peek into, those that are closed but unlocked, and those that look and are locked under seven keys.

“Okay. Door. Old door. So what? Plenty of them here.”

Arthur stirs in her arms.

“I get the feeling…” Clara says, turning the handle. “This one’ll be different.”

“You can’t do that, it’ll probably be something private, this deep into the—”

Bill’s sentence gets cut off halfway in her own brain as she’s saying it.

The room steals her breath away. Walls all made of stone, proper stone, nothing like the fake things people pretend counts as décor these days. Every breath Bill takes in fills her lungs with time itself. Whatever remains in here, whatever breathes alongside her and Clara, is old, very old. And has endured throughout the centuries, untouched, abandoned.

Shelves fill it. Wooden shelves of nondescript origin or historical placing. The clutter that messes their surface is varied, atemporal.

Clara braves up to the dust first. She walks past the curtain of light that bares it to the naked eye, across to one of the shelves.

“We _really_ shouldn’t be here…” Bill mutters. She doesn’t dare speak any louder, as if in doing so she might disturb something that lives here, that awaits someone that’s not them. Something that’s grown tired of the waiting.

Clara twirls again to look at her.

“First rule of traveling with the Doctor,” she says, “is always be curious.” She turns her back again, her fingers to the shelf, to pick up some stylish feather, sharp and inked. “Otherwise you can’t keep up.”

Books pile up in corners. Papers, used and new, scattered on floor and shelf alike, wrinkles in time. Bill sees how they hide objects underneath, small items of the past that seem like they don’t matter. But they must matter to the Doctor, if she’s kept them. How huge must sentimental value grow out to be, for someone without anything else to cling to? And yet this room is untouched.

Everything written down on the covers of those books, in thin lines of ink on those pieces of paper, is in languages Bill doesn’t understand. Languages she doubts at first could even be so. But the traces are so unprecise, so lean, they must be.

She hesitates at first, but she also sees Clara touch everything. And it is impossible to understand without immersion. So Bill lifts up pieces of paper and unearths treasures lost to oblivion.

A withered rose, the thorns still sharp in her fingers. It lies amidst a pile of letters signed in English, not foreign tongues of the universe, but Bill can’t make out what they say. Only fragments. _Rose,_ they all start. _I had to let you go, I’m sorry,_ most say, before the ink runs dry at the end. There’s round ghosts of tears on the paper.

A few shelves away, pressed between two thick books whose titles she can’t make out, a concert ticket protrudes. Bill picks it out carefully. The year reads 1969 and something inside her sinks, because it doesn’t make sense. But something inside her pulses with the knowledge that _somehow_ it really, really does.

“What’s all this?” she asks, more to herself than really out loud.

“Junk, I suppose,” Clara says. “We all have some spot in our rooms for stuff we don’t use but still want to keep. The Doctor’s got a whole _room…_ ”

“He’s clearly got the space for it.”

Quietly, Bill ambles around a bit more, a bit further.

Draped over the frame of a shelf, there’s a purple dress. Bill touches it slightly with one hand, hanging on tight to Arthur with the other. Despite the years, despite the abandon, this piece of handiwork has never been worn. The pockets on it still seem freshly sewn.

On a far-off corner of the room, where the light of non-existent source can barely reach, two bunk beds decay, already partially torn apart by able hands forgotten to build and fueled to destroy their creation. Splintered wood planks rest onto the main structure they came from.

“Some of this doesn’t look like plain old junk,” Bill says.

And then… her eyes wander to uncover the anchor of the room.

“Ms. Oswald,” she calls. She won’t point or interact with it, while carrying Arthur. She won’t let the cat mess around in this room. Not like he did before. Not in proximity of this.

“Clara. You can call me Clara now,” she replies. “I think.”

She’s still fascinated with the minutiae, the details left there to never be noticed. She isn’t aware of what Bill cannot stop _questioning_ because it’s impossible.

“Clara…” Bill tries again. “Come take a look at this. I think it must be something important.”

‘Must’ takes the shine off of it. Or it would, if it had any shine. Covered by a thin blanket, knotted in its own fabric and riddled with tiny little holes, a cradle. In the mess that means nothing, that is just clutter no one wants and no one remembers, a cradle that fits neither description.

Bill was a wanted child. Bill was a child who was forced by unwanted circumstance to grow up cradleless, in the arms of thin mattresses until there were new mother-like arms to hold her. Bill doesn’t need to ask about the value of this, because someone has tried to hide it away from the rest, to mix it in with all of it, and failed. Someone has tried to forget. Bill was a child who never could forget the fact that her life changed course even when she couldn’t have possibly hung on hard enough to stop it from changing.

“Do you think it’s his?” Clara asks. She doesn’t stand by it, a few steps away. Clara kneels by it, on floorboards that creak under her weight, and unveils it, letting light and dust fall onto it. She’s not scared of foreign memories.

“Can’t be,” Bill says. “That’s… centuries old.”

Moira took her to museums when she was little, showed her the world outside Britain. The world that once was Britain’s to claim and ruin, too. History unfolded before her and she thought she understood how much humans had changed, how little _humankind_ had.

“I don’t even know how it’s survived,” she adds.

Clara laughs. She’s looking at the cradle as one might fondly gaze upon a lover’s family photo album, even reaching out to touch the worn-out wood, the scratches on its surfaces, the faded golden writings in the shape of circles that adorn its sides.

“It’s the Doctor’s,” Clara just says. “It must be, why else would he keep it? He’s not the sentimental type, I don’t think. And he certainly doesn’t know that many people. Or have kids.”

“But it’s _old_ ,” Bill insists, ignoring her. “The Doctor’s, what, in—” She almost fails to remember the pronoun Clara associates with the Doctor while thinking of the version she knows. “—his thirties? This cradle’s at least from the Middle Ages. Look at the wear on it.”

The soft tolling from the TARDIS fills the silence for a second. Clara gives no sign that she can hear it or interpret what it means.

“Bill,” Clara says, still grinning, not aware of the elephant in the room. Or rather the big absence of it. “The Doctor’s had at least eleven lives that he can count. And probably a few that he can’t. How many years is that?” She groans as she gets back up. “I think that adds up to your calculation. More or less.”

Although the actual tolling has stopped, Bill’s heart does so so loudly, so hard, it might as well announce its own beats like a church bell.

“So what you’re saying is…?” Her throat is getting dryer by the second.

Clara looks at her and, in the sudden shakiness she sees, seems to find something that _doesn’t_ add up to any calculation.

“He didn’t tell you that?”

“No, yeah, he _ab_ solutely did.”

“How long have you been traveling with him?” Clara asks, getting more serious.

“A while. Listen, I just… need a minute. Mind if I pop out for a second? I think Arthur’s a bit… _off_. He’s scratched me a couple times already and…”

She hurries out of the room, unable to believe she’s lied half as well as she has. She leaves too quickly, and does not hear Clara’s last words to her, worried, forgotten already about what Bill doesn’t know, asking if she can hear the TARDIS’s warning toll. If she can hear _something else_ moving in the shadows.

By the time Bill steps back in, having regained her breath a bit and her senses a bit less, Clara’s gone. Even the air hasn’t retained her scent. The lack of her imprint is proof enough that something, someone wants Bill to think she’d never been there at all. Clara Oswald is as gone as she was that summer, when no one said anything and no one spoke her name again, like she’d never existed.

Bill doesn’t see the painting of a woman in Victorian attire, neglected by time, hidden well between shelf and stone wall. She doesn’t see the resemblance between the painted face and the face that just disappeared once more.

Bill quite simply just holds on tight to Arthur and closes the door behind her.

“Looks like it’s just you and me again, pal…”

The cat seems to lean against her chest.

Her steps this time don’t take her very far. Wherever she is, the depths of the space and dimension don’t appear to want to change into impossible shapes anymore, caging her in labyrinths only escapable by cheating or begging for mercy. Shortly after she begins to get immersed in the hum of distant engines and the tolling that now is just a constant, a heartbeat of a machine, she notices an archway, not a door.

Beyond it, green.

Bill doesn’t even think she has seen that color in the TARDIS before. It’s all grays and dark blues and the occasional yellow and red. Everything is … dim. Dim and old and like it’s soon to be forgotten when you close your eyes. Green is trees, and vibrancy. Green is luck and hope and tomorrow. Green is a hole finally slowly getting warmth poured in—warmth, a little bit of sunlight, where life can grow back in and upwards from.

She walks through it as if on the other side was the TARDIS console room.

Instead, she finds the opposite of what she was expecting. If green is life, this is death. Even with plants growing everywhere in an equilibrium that knows no bound and follows no rules, even if flowers bloom and bugs buzz in the air. Bill stands in the grass, where tombstones are dug, immobile and gray.

Gray again. Inescapable.

Gently, she puts Arthur down, lets him meander. The prairie goes on and on as far as the eye can see, there is even something like a sky, clear blue and calm, not a cloud on sight. He could get away, but her hands are trembling now, it’s better for him to be on the ground.

She can never finish counting the tombstones.

She can’t even get close at first. She doesn’t want to prove Clara right, because if she kneels by any of these, if she finds out about the dates, if she goes one by one and adds them up… Then what? Eleven lives, she said. How many people can one see die in eleven full lives if nobody else ever survives as long?

The junk in that room was never junk. Bill rubs the back of her hand on her eyes. The junk in that room was memories the Doctor doesn’t want welling up _her_ eyes anymore.

By the time she approaches the first line of tombs, tombs that are just stuck on grass, tombs without bodies, Bill understands. The Doctor and Missy, they’re not just aliens. They go on and on, they did get hurt. And they’re trying to heal but they can’t. Of course they can’t.

Bill reads _so_ many names. She passes by so many dates of birth and defunction.

But the names that hurt the most are the names whose tombs have something else beside the names. Circles, like the language in the junk room. Golden circles below the names and the dates. And letters yellowed by time resting in the imperturbable breezeless air, on the grass that meets stone.

Bill stares at each and every one of the tombstones for a long time before she moves on to the next. And there are so, so many.

_…Susan Foreman. River Song. Rory Williams. Martha Jones. Sarah Smith. Jack Harkness. Rose Tyler. Amy Pond. Donna Noble. Wilfred Mott. Clara Oswald…_

Bill stops to read it again. It can’t be.

_Clara Oswald. 1986-?_

The inscription in golden shifts into a language Bill suddenly can understand.

_The impossible girl._

And she does. She does understand. She’s standing at a graveyard of the people who came before her. The people the Doctor lost because her life is too long and the dangers are too many.

And she is painfully aware of where she’s going. When she finds her way back, this TARDIS is taking her to another planet, to see beauty and risk as one and to face them both, if so they come. Bill has never wanted anything in her life, except everything that Earth cannot offer. She wants this, still.

She rises from Clara Oswald’s impossible empty tomb and yet she still wants this. Another planet, danger to run from, laughter to shake her up as long as she’s alive to escape it.

But Bill has read other inscriptions. _Loving spouse to…_ And nowhere is it written what became of those spouses and what questions they had.

One day, the Doctor will come here to dig her tombstone in the grass, into the dirt. _Bill Potts,_ it will say. _Loving wife to Heather Arbenoir._

And Bill will remain as a physical, tangible presence on this earth, defying nature and science-fiction alike, only to feel it in her non-skin, the moment in which they tell Heather. Only to erupt out of the very air and tell her the truth, then. _I died because I was stupid, I ran to what I loved, but I forgot there was something at home I loved, too._

She has to make a choice. Because if something like this happens to her because of her thirst for adventures, not telling Heather about where she is and what she is doing only means Heather will never know why Bill can’t—won’t—ever come back.

And that will destroy Bill before she ever comes close to dying.

Even now, she knows she’s spending too much time _away_ from Heather. It doesn’t matter if Heather might not experience it as such because she isn’t aware of the time dilation. Is that what Bill wants? A life that slowly evolves to be all about running away? Then returning to someone she loves but not enough to trust that person with the other part, the bigger part that shouldn’t be that significant?

She can do this, the traveling, and also settle down. She can have both things, just one, or none, but she has to let Heather know first.

_I’m seeing the universe, Heather. But I’m seeing you, too._

It does boil down to that.

And it’s not half as hard as she thought. Simple words. In the face of the simplest of realities. Death prompts life to bloom, in the end. She can’t be scared of a conversation, a closed door, and not of impending perils. She just can’t.

It takes her a while to find Arthur again among flower, stone, and grass, a tombstone without an inscription she can read, all golden circles and no dates, covered in the greatest expanse of old handwritten letters.

He comes easily to her when she calls. They both march far from the graveyard, and Bill wishes the image of it would burn away from her mind, but it is as insistent as the tolling. That soft, soft tolling that leads her out into the corridor…

… into the console room, where there is just the ever-present hum, and two aliens bickering still.

“All I’m saying is, easy mode? I’ve had her for basically forever, I’ve never used easy mode.”

“Basically forever and… how many times have you crashed or ended up in the middle of nowhere?”

Bill blinks in utter confusion.

“Hey…” she says.

“Quick pee-er, are you?” Missy says. She spots the cat in her arms. “Arthur… What an asshole pet you make, not letting your poor lady friend go to the bathroom alone.”

It takes Bill a second to react like a proper normal person who has just taken a short trip to the bathroom and not a longer, definitely longer, one across a whole spaceship.

“Yeah, he’s every bit like a cat like that.”

“Missy,” the Doctor reprimands.

“What?”

“Manners! You can’t call him that.”

“I can call him whatever I like. We can’t have him following us everywhere, it’ll become a misbehavior and soon enough we’ll have to train it out of him and we all know you have no attention span to.”

Bill sits in the chair normally allotted for Missy’s dramatic poses. Arthur meows contemplatively. He’s beginning to make a little bit of noise today, more than ever. She supposes that’s progress.

“See?” the Doctor says, pointing a hand at the cat. “You’ve disturbed him. He gets distressed when you insult him.”

Missy blows raspberries.

“And how in the _world_ would you know that?”

“’Cause I speak cat.”

“You speak…. You speak cat. Right. That’s the biggest piece of bullshit I have ever heard from you, he’s not even a real cat!”

Arthur meows again.

“Of course he isn’t a real cat,” the Doctor says, her translation voice on. “But a little appreciation goes a long way.”

She motions for Bill to hand him over, and he seems content enough for some new company, even if it is from the Doctor, who he still very much remembers put him in the pool. Repeatedly. Right now, though, he still likes her better than Missy, who pets him when no one looks and gives him treats but otherwise pretends, mostly for show, to dislike him profoundly. He likes to play the same game.

The Doctor baby-talks to the cat for a little while, as Missy rolls her eyes, and Bill chuckles at the both of them.

An alert goes off, then. Missy approaches the screen.

“It says something here about a time leak…” she reads, frowning. Immediately, she smiles. “Ah, but it self-corrected. So that’s good.”

“Then it wasn’t a time leak. I always have to go into the Eye of Harmony to sort things out when that happens.”

“Well, maybe the easy mode thing helped,” Missy says, smirking at her.

The Doctor sticks out her tongue.

“We’re getting close now,” Missy says to Bill. “Want to take a look?”

The doors of the TARDIS open, and Bill stands up slowly. Her feet take her there, but it’s her eyes that truly fly free. Below them, around them. Everywhere, there it is. Her first planet away from the solar system she knows.

Bill stands in awe at the beauty, at the range of beige and soft browns and pale oranges, not hinting at deserts, not even at anything geographical in particular, just… at the autumns she remembers from her childhood before the rain begins to fall.

“It’s a peaceful place, good species populate it, living in serenity. No danger at all,” the Doctor narrates, coming to the TARDIS doors to stand next to Bill. She adds: “Aptly chosen.”

From the console, Missy looks longingly, darkly, onto the horizon between the planet’s thin atmosphere and the nothingness of space, and a shadow passes over her hearts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know in canon Clara’s not working at Coal Hill when _Journey to the Center of the TARDIS_ happens, but it’s AU so it’s a license I’m allowing myself. And her dress in that ep is just so recognizable I had to ^^


	9. Of one's miseries

The ship crashes against hard ground. Any landing gear that might have survived from recent, unwise travels now uncouples itself from the shell of the ship and peels itself off with a rumble.

The more time he’s lived through, the less time he feels he has. There will be no more trips to escape it and what it endlessly washes up on the shores of his life. Not anymore.

Somehow, the shock wave of that thought has him reaching for the dead controls—for something to keep him standing—faster than turbulence has.

His breath is drowned by the sounds of the dying machine. It croaks in muffled pain. He has pushed it too hard for too many years, intermittently as it may have been. It was never meant to take him this far.

He looks out at a landscape that he doesn’t recognize. Months and years and centuries he has skipped past, how could he?

Does the version of the world he’s left behind exist somewhere out there, too, like the memories that sit in his chest, making it hard to breathe? Making it hard to so much as exist in a body out of time.

It doesn’t matter that he spent half a lifetime working on fields, straw hat shielding his head from hot dark suns, sleeves pulled up to his elbows, scythes well-gripped in calloused hands. It doesn’t matter to time.

So long ago, instead of this nothingness that stretched for miles inside him, there was a life to be lived. Someone to live it with when the morning dawned, when the nights came. But time comes as well. And nothing can stop it.

They never even had children, and he doesn’t know now whether to be grateful he never had to watch them die as well, or grieve the idea of descendants that would have carried a bit of his slapdash family forward.

Young but aging, graying, without a mark to show for the passing of time—except his possessions, treasured and now strewn, shattered over the cabin of his ship—he wallows in old miseries.

He should have flown away when he had the chance. Before meeting people that made him want to stay and then made it hard, just hard. When ‘away’ was still an option on the controls. Before space confined itself and time was all he had.

Time… It takes and it takes, and yet it’s all there is.

When he moves, slowly, he stumbles. His open palm stains an already dirty window. He groans as he leans onto the floor to pick up a piece of cloth to wipe it with. From a ship that has now landed itself for a final time, he looks out at the future of his last home. No fields, a dying sun.

He wonders if, somewhere out behind the cliffs, there are still people who remember. And it’s too funny that he really, really can’t bother to care anymore.

The memory is loud enough in his head, almost an echo of a noise. Pain and heartbeats and old rage. He’ll keep it safe here, alone. People don’t matter. People are the reason he’s here.

Right now, this is good enough. Away. Alone. Asking himself if it’s worth it. If all these years are worth anything. Pain, rage. Why fend them off? Why pretend they are not stronger than he is? For an old traveler who left him to die and now might as well just be atoms in the heart of some star?

Being good, he has learned, only ever brings more pain, only ever makes him rage harder because of how hard it is, how lonely. People die even when he’s not the one actively doing the killing, they die around him like flies.

Why continue to refuse the side of pain that, at the very least, _takes away_ the burden of having to make an effort?

The people he might have cared enough to do that for are no longer with him to draw his strength from. And the one he once kept hoping to meet regardless, because you never know with time travelers, did never choose this planet to visit in his many lives.

So why be good, if nothing he feels ever is? Why be good, at the end of the day, without anyone to be good _for_?

* * *

Work, food, sleep, such are the unspoken dogmas of society. And this moment in time must definitely belong to the latter, because Bill’s eyes are open, reality is perfectly interwoven by the same physics as back home, yet she could swear on anything sacred that it couldn’t be but a figment of the imagination she has clung to every night since the warehouse.

“This is an alien planet?” she asks.

She pops her head in and out of the blue doors, but the sights don’t convince her any more on the second try. She could be standing inside her very own head at night or a desolate, beautiful part of Earth that the National Geographic fails to photograph as often as they should.

“Not everything’s all sci-fi,” the Doctor tells her. “Sometimes it’s extraordinary, most times it’s just what you already know, with a twist.”

Bill pops her head out again. The doors creak every time she does that.

Up there, a big red sun shines feebly in a sky that is whiter than blue, and not because of cloud concentration. Bill suddenly remembers _why_ the Earth sky has its characteristic color.

“We’re not going to die of underoxygenation, are we? Or… because of some weird gas that’s in there that our lungs can’t process.” Funnily enough, despite her words, she’s smiling.

“Why did you think the space helmets in the wardrobe were for?” the Doctor says.

“No way!”

“’Course no way. It’s safe to breathe. Even the sun’s safe…” The Doctor glances up at the ball of red that shines above them. It barely gives off much light anymore. Her eyes regard it with reverence, as if she grieved for the life that star would never get back now. “Time ago, we would have needed equipment to so much as stand underneath it.”

Bill’s less inclined to think of it as a dream if she knows it’s only dangerous at a distance, malleable for physics and not in anyone’s control. Dreams are playgrounds for dormant brains.

When, this time, she keeps her head out of the TARDIS for a full minute, the slightly salty breeze that’s picked up from the ocean, a hundred yards away and hundreds below, scatters her curls around her face. It doesn’t smell like the sea she knows, somehow it’s thicker and less invasive to the senses at the same time. Her smile grows and grows, heavier than the salt in the air, and warmer than the past of that sun.

“Here,” says Missy’s voice behind the two of them.

Bill turns around a bit to find Missy hurriedly adjusting a yellow beanie onto the Doctor’s head.

“Don’t want you losing all your heat _and_ your thoughts through your head, now, do we?” Missy tells her. The Doctor mumbles a quiet complaint that takes her nowhere, because Missy also dumps a red scarf onto her chest. “It’s cold out there. That coat of yours won’t be enough.” In her other arm, she’s holding Bill’s parka. She walks up to her. “And as for you… put it on or we’re not leaving here.”

Bill chuckles. Missy herself has covered herself in a few thick layers of clothing, a hat, her sunglasses, and trekking boots. And now she’s insisting on everybody else adjusting to her same predisposition towards the weather, which, in Bill’s opinion, isn’t that harsh.

When Bill zips up, Missy steps closer to her to adjust her scarf and hat, too, with a different urgency than she did the Doctor’s. She’s not hurrying Bill along, she’s… almost grumbling about Bill not being responsible enough to care about her own wellbeing and safety.

Bill’s had that in her life, she’s had it twice, if she’s being honest. Moira wasn’t a bad mother to her, not in the things that matter in the basic fabric of a child’s upbringing. And Bill daydreamed often enough about her biological mum caring for her as well. But… having it come from a stranger who has no obligation to her, who could just leave it at a friendly distance… it adds worth to the feeling that she’s cared for. Now, thrice.

“Thank you,” she just says. Sometimes it’s all she knows to say to them. To Missy, especially.

“You keep warm, dear,” Missy replies. “Keep safe.”

The Doctor locks the TARDIS doors behind them, and Bill stands in an alien world, breathing in the strangeness and the familiarity of scents that bring back memories at the same time that they create new ones.

Down in the long sloping stretch of drying land that unites the miles and miles of cliffs behind the TARDIS with in-land territory, a collection of a few streets, houses, and boats, sits almost in view. The sea licks at the small port, at the shores that bathe the land, the cliffs, but not the town itself. It has been successfully kept away from a sea that doesn’t mirror the sickly white of the sky.

Bill can’t help but stare at its wondrous immensity. As far as her eye can see, in every direction except back from where she is, there is ocean.

“It’s so… dark,” she observes. “Is it because of the salts? Or does it have different components?” She opens her eyes wide at a possible realization. “Is it not water?”

The Doctor makes a happy noise in the back of her throat. She pauses in her walking, close to the edge of a surface that is neither cliff nor hill yet rests atop the sea regardless.

She leans over, dangerously so. Bill feels tempted to grab at her gray coat just in case. It gives her the worst stomach butterflies to see her do that, unafraid of falling.

“Can’t tell,” the Doctor says, still looking in at the calm waves. “But I really like your salt hypothesis. Different salts than on Earth might mean different composition of the water, _and,_ because of that, different coloration!”

She takes in a deep breath with her eyes closed to the breeze, and the frown that plagues the Doctor’s face most days melts into a peaceful smile that fades back into forehead creases the second she opens her eyes again.

They resume their strolling, then, with Bill walking ahead fast, out of a barely contained enthusiasm. The Doctor chooses to ignore how unsettling it is to see the back of a companion like this, without so much as knowing what could come at them from the front. But that’s life, all the time, not just everywhere else on space that isn’t home.

Behind her, Missy takes her time. Her eyes don’t follow the curve of the coastline, or the never-ending stretch of the ocean. She didn’t add on to the salt discussion. And there was no teasing.

The Doctor fails to take another step when she realizes how truly and stupidly rare it is for Missy not to jump at any and all chances to tease. She waits until they’re both side by side to go on forward after Bill.

“You okay?” she asks Missy.

It takes Missy a couple of seconds to realize she’s being spoken to.

“What?” She looks up at the Doctor. “Oh, yes. Everything’s fine, it’s just…” She quickly glances back, once more, at the cliffs behind them. “It’s this place, that’s all. Bit hostile.”

The Doctor smiles at her, trying to cheer her up.

“What? Because of the bitter cold, the dying sun, and the mostly barren land?”

Missy, however, doesn’t return the smile. She keeps glancing back behind her.

“No. It’s just this feeling I’ve got. Like it doesn’t like me very much.”

The Doctor’s frown deepens and Missy suddenly remembers that the Doctor’s only here at a request, that if it were for her, Bill would have never left Bristol to engage in possibly unsafe situations. She won’t jeopardize the first real trip since Plant Planet for a _hunch_ that doesn’t even qualify as that.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Missy says. This time, she makes sure to grin at the Doctor, to knock at bit at her hand with her own, playfully. “It’s just me.”

The Doctor waits a second, assessing every single change in Missy’s face, until she decides it is, indeed, fine enough to smile again.

“’Course it is,” she says. “What planet wouldn’t like you?”

But, as they descend on the town’s outskirts, it is less about who the planet likes and more about who likes the planet. Standing far away from civilization in order to wonder at what nature creates and destroys is one thing. Knowing that not that far away from you awaits the unpredictability of people again, who she cannot control or even fully understand, is the stuff of nightmares the Doctor remembers all too well upon waking every morning.

The colors are too beige and orange, reminiscent of those forests and mountains and skies that burned and rose from ashes unwound from time. She rambles on about the collections of houses, the composition of the materials the houses themselves are built on, and pretends that seeing Missy walk like a bodyguard behind Bill is all the relief she needs to stop seeing ghosts of war everywhere on a planet known for peace.

“It’s all like…” Bill swirls around, walking backwards, fearless. “You know those sorts of dwellings in really hot places? It’s all built a bit like that. To keep the heat out. Which is kind of… ironic, since it’s _freezing_ out here.” She looks up at the sun. “ _And_ that sun’s been dead for a while.”

“Not dead, dead,” Missy says. “Just fading out of life. Stars take a long time to die.”

She and the Doctor exchange glances. _Like Time Lords._

Bill faces the world in front of her again. A few locals emerge from their houses, talking to each other. Their greeting is a curt nod and a briefer smile that makes the thick coarse dark bark that acts as their skin create new long creases on their faces when they do. Covering their bodies is only thin ankle-long light brown attire, loose and breathy.

“Wow,” Bill says. “Now I know why they’re not cold.”

The Doctor grins a tiny little bit. Bill’s energy is contagious. “Insulating skin. Must work for heat and cold both. Look, they don’t even have hair, it’s all sort of like cute little branches growing on their heads. I so want to just touch—”

“No going around touching people’s… head branches, Doctor. That’s just common decency,” Bill tells her off, but she still can’t help but sound more excited than firm.

She is painfully and beautifully aware of the fact that she has walked past real-life aliens that aren’t her friends or a pet. Aliens who live here, who know nothing but this, and who probably get the feeling The Doctor, Missy and Bill aren’t from around here and yet aren’t even staring. Her beaming is brighter than the sun right now.

“We really are the alien tourists here…” she says, almost gasping. A few streets up ahead, activity awaits them. People gathering to exchange goods, to talk in the few patches of sunlight available between shade and shade. She turns back to look at her friends. “And you did this? All the time?”

She almost asks them, again, without thinking, why they would ever think to stop.

They nod at her.

“D’you have _any_ idea how crazy this all is?” Bill says.

She doesn’t even know where to look. The people… She can’t even decide whether to think of them as a whole, a different species to her own, anthropomorphic yet with new characteristics to help them survive; or as so many individuals, living such creatively beautiful lives on their own in this town. The fractals of life that exist into the web of one single patch of existence threaten to expand inside her head until she spends an eternity just trying to understand one millionth of them. One tiny little dot in a sphere of an ocean.

“In my time, we’re still wondering if there was ever _water_ on Mars. And that’s just… in my solar system, in my galaxy. In the observable universe!” Bill laughs a crystalline laughter in the breeze that moves her scarf around. “Meanwhile, out there, somewhere, life already exists. Life thrives and changes and none of it even contemplates humanity.” She takes a deep, deep breath, smiling. “There’s just something _really_ wonderful about an existence untainted by the ambition and arrogance of human beings.”

They begin walking again towards the market.

“You do find all of this one day,” the Doctor says. “Out of… maybe not arrogance, but a little bit of ambition. Without that, you would never have gone anywhere. It’s the extremes that weigh you down, in the end.”

“Plus,” Missy adds. “You’re really not the worst colonizing species out there.”

“That’s a terrible compliment,” Bill says, chuckling.

Missy leans towards Bill, eyes wide open, dramatically.

“Oh, I know,” she says, but she echoes the chuckle. “It’s not a compliment.”

Bill forgets, however, about the mark humankind may in the future leave on the imprints of the universe, because in the present daily life weighs lively and buoyant above it all.

Out of compactly built dwellings with thick walls, punched-in windows and beaded doors, locals pour in and out, joining their own community in constant streams of activity.

Down at the market, Bill spends so much time just standing close to everything. Stalls of food that instead of rising up to create shade stretch sideways to allow people to walk in between, objects that she recognizes because of similarities with some from home, and objects that must be put to use in matters she could never even guess. Their transactions are even moneyless, without including exchanges of other items as well. When the Doctor had spoken of peace, many things had come to Bill’s mind, but never a definition that outlived the capitalism of her time and space.

The Doctor, Missy and her end up talking their way around whole streets, finding new food to eat at Bill’s request—because if she is in a different planet, now is the time to truly get her stomach to believe it—, and chuckling with a few neighbors about the cold, which, impressively, the locals don’t seem to mind even in the coldest seasons.

In the sun, they manage well to go ahead and pretend they don’t, either. And Bill takes every last second of sunlight coming down from the sky and, just like every chuckle, every smile, every step the three of them take together, she treasures it next to her warm heart. She knows, deep down where she prefers not to listen in on the darkness, on the humidity, that not all days are like this, that it will end soon, and that only by living it as it occurs will she truly feel like it was a worthy experience to have lived and lost.

She savors the meat in her food better than the old bacon sandwiches in the cafeteria at St. Luke’s, even though those are quite nice, and she dangles her feet on the wall she’s sitting on as she eats it, while the Doctor and Missy banter on together with her. In moments like this, Earth does not even exist as a blue marble somewhere out there in the wide inevitable distance.

Sometimes, in between words that mean nothing and yet fill space with old familiar sounds and inflections, Bill thinks she can see shadows pass their faces. Eventually, it gets too dark around them, when the sun begins to set, to be able to tell anymore.

By the time they have their own breaths visible in the air before them, Bill stands up from the wall, her feet rigid from the cold, and looks around her.

“Shouldn’t we be heading back?” she asks.

The Doctor gets up from the floor. Missy waits below her, hand at the ready in case the Doctor stumbled and fell.

“Uhhh… yeah,” the Doctor says. “It’s a long walk from here. Longer without sunlight to keep us warm.”

“It’ll be night by the time we get there,” Bill says. “And it’s getting really dark already. They have no streetlights here.”

“Urgh,” Missy complains. “I hate species that never discovered electricity.”

The Doctor purses her lips and looks at the other two, trying to wordlessly convince them to get moving already.

“So what do we do?” Bill asks. When a few seconds pass, she adds: “What do you normally do?”

“TARDIS. But it is a long walk away,” Missy says. She looks at the Doctor. “We could try and find somewhere to stay…”

They hold each other’s gazes before Bill, and in that moment they don’t see her, but she sees them. The shadows in their eyes, on their faces, are darker than the light of dusk. She wonders if the place they come from, the species they belong to, fears the dark as humanity does.

“One night,” the Doctor says. “And tomorrow we leave. First light.”

Bill nods meekly. She knows an order when she hears one. She knows not to question it. She’s a passenger on a ship, she has safety rules to abide by, she has a captain that she knows _will_ protect Bill’s life before her very own. One day she was promised, one trip. Bill nods gratefully, because she remembers the gravestones, and her longing for more cannot make her forget the lurch of fear in the back of her throat at the thought of her name ever being on one without her friends and family ever knowing.

* * *

At the counter, yellow eyes inquisitively stare at Bill, the Doctor, and Missy. They probably weren’t expecting anyone at this hour and, by what they’re saying, _anyone at all_ this time of year.

“People are reluctant to come here,” they say. “Because of the cold, some argue. And the lack of things to do. Makes you wonder what people spend time on in their own towns. This one is quite nice, if you ask me.”

“Have you been living here long?” Bill asks.

Just like back at the market, they don’t need money to rent a room. Or, actually, to _rent_ it at all. They’re not even asking for names or addresses or anything to identify who Bill, the Doctor, and Missy are. More than peace, Bill is finding that these people live by trust. And she’s not sure if she likes it or if it makes her own notions of distrust grow by overanalyzing it.

“My family’s from the islands of Greanniol, just right off the coast,” they reply. “Twenty-three revolutions we’ve been living here. Everyone likes it, I’d say.”

“How many Earth years is that?” Bill whispers to the Doctor.

“A day here lasts a few hours less, so… I don’t know. Thirty? Ish?”

“Anyway, I won’t keep you anymore. Room Chalise’s yours,” they say. “And remember not to go out at night. The kids in my family hate that, but they would hate the situation extra if they did go out and something happened to them that could’ve been prevented, so there’s that.”

With a smile, Bill and the Doctor say goodbye and head to the rooms in the floor above them. Missy stays behind for a few seconds more, frozen in a memory of distant times that she can’t quite place, all because of that name. _Chalise…_ The brick-like staircases that leads upstairs is out in the open in the bitter cold and beneath the stars, and it quickly returns some sense into her head when the air blows against her face.

“Bit weird that they have a curfew here,” Bill says. “Although, without streetlights, no wonder. Poor kids wouldn’t see a thing if they wanted to play out there.”

“What I wonder is how the hell anyone gets anything done during days this short…” Missy grumbles.

It takes a bit of looking around for the room, since they’re not numbered and are instead named. Bill asks who after, and it’s not until they’ve gone past the same rooms a couple of times that the Doctor slams her own hand against her forehead and remembers something about some hero in some part of history that the locals must admire. The rest must follow the same pattern. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who Chalise is. Missy is quick to add that it makes little sense for the naming pattern to change just for a room.

Once they find the room and get inside it, Bill has to hold back laughter at the sight of only two beds, barely wide enough for one person each.

“Now, isn’t this lovely?” Missy says, driving the point home.

Someone downstairs has made some assumptions. And someone else (Bill) is clearly trying _not_ to find that terribly funny. It really can say a lot about the locals and their ways of life if they can _assume_ this much about their visitors.

The Doctor barely even glances at the two beds other than to know they’re there, she takes off her coat and spreads it out it like a towel on the floor, blocking the entrance with her body as she goes lay down.

“Problem solved, see?” she says, worming upwards until most of her is on top of warm cloth, her head tucked over her arms, and she can adjust a bit of overhang from the gray coat to cover her side so she’s not entirely at the mercy of the cold.

Bill and Missy stare at each other, almost crossing their arms at the same time.

“Absolutely no way,” Missy says, already taking off her own coat to drape over the floor and sitting down.

“Two beds and you’re going to sleep on there like a cat?” Bill says, doing exactly the same thing.

The three of them stare at each other. Bill and Missy’s eyes meet indignantly in the crossfire.

“What are you doing?” Missy mouths at Bill, trying not to get the Doctor to notice. “Get up from there, now we both look stupid.”

“You get up. It won’t work if you do it. I’ve protected status, she can’t let me sleep on the floor for her.”

“She’s not moving from the floor. I don’t think it’s _working._ ”

The Doctor rolls around towards them and waves dismissively.

“Just get up onto the beds, I’ll be fine!” she says. “Before I had my TARDIS furnished and ready to go, I had to sleep like this a few times. And it was pretty alright. I could feel the vibrations.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure that means you had the engines to warm you up during the night…” Bill says. “No engines here.”

Missy suddenly gets up from the floor and offers Bill a hand to do the same.

“Up you go, dear,” she says, nodding at the bed on the right side of the room, practically stuck against the wall where the opening to the outside is, until Bill takes the hint and is sitting on it. Missy then turns towards the Doctor. She doesn’t crouch or kneel or lean in, not even a little bit. She adds, softly: “There’s enough space there for two.”

“I don’t know, Missy…” Bill can hear the hesitance in the Doctor’s voice, her attempt to minimize something she’s not even going to get close to verbalizing.

“You’re not sleeping on the floor, sweetheart.”

Bill’s breath stops in her when she realizes she has never before heard Missy call anyone that. Missy calls people ‘dear’, she gives that word around to people, in every single tone of voice she is capable of and in as many situations as it is socially possible, but… the tenderness with which she has uttered that ‘sweetheart’ for the Doctor right now is throwing Bill out of her own body. She understands now the true meaning of centuries and how they can manifest, she is hearing it.

She sees, too, how Missy finally crouches down to the Doctor’s level, how the Doctor humbly hugs her own legs in the little nest of gray coat she has made for herself, and says:

“I’m used to the floor, it’s not a bad place to sleep.”

The fact that the Doctor tucks herself in even more doesn’t seem to help.

“I’ll walk back to the TARDIS for the night, if you want. I’ll take the floor, I’ll take the _ground_ outside,” Missy whispers. Bill tries to look away. Those are not words for her to overhear. “I’ll stand guard hour upon hour by this arch. Just take the bed. Please.” She begs. Missy _begs._ Softly, without raising her voice, without letting it betray her or her emotions. But she is, without a doubt, begging the Doctor now. “Don’t make me watch you take the space you’d never have anyone else endure.”

It doesn’t last but a few seconds, yet they hold each other’s gazes in the room, and when breaths and free glances flood it again, the Doctor stands up with Missy, throwing all of their coats onto a table that might be a dresser as well.

They both lie down on the bed in the left side of the room. At first, Bill’s not very sure what’s happening, if the Doctor was unsure about doing that because _she_ was there and could see, but now that they’ve taken up a small space together, now that they’re touching, arms around shoulders, pulling each other close to save room, Bill cannot believe that anymore. It wasn’t prudery or embarrassment.

She looks at them and doesn’t see a reflection of the relationships she knows in her own society, she sees something that echoes and amplifies parts of those relationships so much that they transform into something else entirely. And she awes in their presence, feeling small next to them, slightly insignificant, like when she first found out just how tiny the Earth was compared in scale with _everything_ else.

“I feel bad taking up a whole bed now,” she jokes.

“Don’t,” the Doctor tells her, all crumbled up against Missy’s torso. “She snores and I kick in my sleep.”

Missy nods so as to corroborate.

“You’re _really_ better off not sharing, Bill, dear. We don’t really even sleep much.”

Bill ends up lying back against the wall as well.

“That’s got to be tough. I couldn’t get by without sleep.”

“You’re only human,” the Doctor says softly against Missy’s stomach. Her breath is quiet, and she closes her eyes for a moment. Bill wonders now when the last time was that she slept properly.

“So you really don’t… you don’t sleep like we do? Eight hours every day?” she says. “You should.”

“We should,” Missy confirms. “But we can survive without it. It’s a long story.”

Everything is, with those two, Bill supposes.

“Still can’t imagine it, what a life that must be like, living past midnight, having memory upon memory of… the dark, while you’re still in it…” She’s mostly just talking to herself out loud, but the thought registers, and the Doctor hears—the Doctor freezes slightly in Missy’s arms.

That hits too close to home.

“You really get used to it, dear,” Missy says. “Now, we really could do something fun or at least pretend we’re going to, because it’s not even that late in the time zone we came from, and we’re already about prepared to fall asleep right here right now. That’s incredibly boring of us all.”

Amused, Bill snorts and makes an effort to sit up on her mattress and engage. They might be a bit boring, after all, but Missy forgives them—and herself—for it. Not everything can be magnificent, grandiose, and extravagant, even in the subtle ways Missy always ends up finding to be.

Bill throws her head back against the wall, the corners of her mouth, her cheeks, tight after laughing so hard, and she imagines this is the _subtle_ version of a slumber party in Missy’s head. They joke about human traditions, Bill tells them about actual slumber parties with booze and PDA—explaining to the Doctor what PDA means and what it _means_ is actually a conversation she never thought she’d have and a conversation that makes her stomach hurt as much as her mouth when Missy has to restrain herself from biting her lips closed from all the giggling.

“In my day, we just called that… necking, I think,” the Doctor says, and although she’s trying to sound casual and not at all flustered and amused, Bill sees.

“You’re so _old_ ,” Missy tells her, loudly, clearly, beautifully, her hand absentmindedly toying with the hem of the Doctor’s yellow cardigan. “Nobody ever called that necking.”

“Nobody ever _necked_ ,” the Doctor says.

“They did. You were just… not noticing it.” And Missy looks at her, _noticing_ her.

Bill begins to understand that the story she thought she knew isn’t all there is to this. And she smiles despite herself. Old friends bickering about old times in each other’s arms. She knows so many actual romantic partnerships that never even had friendship to stand on. She knows so many tales of unrequited romance, pining, drama. She herself has fallen in love with girls who never once even saw her standing a few feet away. To be noticed like this, without a single drop of pining in the scant space between them, Bill thinks that must transcend friendships, relationships themselves.

The Doctor sits upright, enough so that she can look at Missy in the eye, confused just as she is curious: “Did you ever did that when we were young?”

Missy makes a poignant face that should suffice as an answer.

“I think Missy here has done it all,” Bill says with a smirk.

“All of time and all of space, and she asks me now if I fucked around when I was a teenager. Well, of course I fucked around. I didn’t get the nicknames I _got_ just because I was tall and broad-shouldered and _very_ impressive.”

“You _chose_ your nicknames.”

“They fit me quite well!”

On and on it goes, the brief glances into a past, the anecdotes Bill shares of a present that feels smaller every time she tries to reach into it. Classes about topics she doesn’t really think matter now, in the middle of space. Domestic bliss with Heather, who she keeps secrets from, who she loves but can’t quite yet trust with her fear. That one time when she fell down the stairs in uni, no one saw, and she managed to very nearly avoid crashing onto one of her professors on the way down and reemerge entirely unscathed and on her feet before the professor realized what had happened. Bless people forgetting to look up from their phones when they walk these days. Every word she speaks and chuckles to weighs less and less, is worth a bit less than the one before, like she was spending the final pennies of the life she hasn’t even decided what to do with.

The Doctor did only just say _one_ trip. And then they would see.

But what is she to do, if they don’t stop? Is she going to just press pause on her _life_ , on the choices she loves more—because she does—than her desire to run?

And if they don’t ever hop back on a moving TARDIS, is she going to be able to face life the same way again, with the same make-believe hope that somewhere along the line life will be tolerable enough for her not to want to daydream it away? Is she, really, after seeing all of this and knowing there _are_ ways to live without money, without wars, without external pressure to perform?

She’s grateful when the Doctor literally jumps out of Missy’s arms and the bed to grab her coat, incapable of sitting still for very long. It saves Bill from having to deal with the internal pressure of thinking about it anymore.

“I’m hungry,” the Doctor says. “Any of you want anything?”

“Does the town even have shops open this late? Or do they have vending machines?” Bill smiles to herself. “Alien vending machines. I’d love to see that. Maybe you just press a button and can get whatever you need. Now, that’s smart. Instead of paying inflated prices for meager amounts of food, you actually get what you need, and contribute to the town yourself in other small ways.”

The Doctor winks at her as she adjusts her red scarf around her neck.

“Ah, little kids pressing the button fifteen times so they can prank the machine…” She sighs longingly and does a little bit of a hop on the spot. “Right. You sure you don’t want anything?”

When the other two shake their heads, adding that they had too much to eat earlier, she leaves bouncing on her heels.

Missy immediately turns to Bill on the other bed, leaning a bit towards her as if she was about to whisper.

“Major troublemaker in school, this one,” Missy says in a confidant-to-confidant tone.

“Hard to believe she’s now so…” Bill swallows. She opts to find a better term for what she wants to say than ‘scared of danger’. “Wary of everything.”

Missy sighs.

“Yeah.”

Downstairs, the Doctor hides inside her scarf against the freezing cold in the night as she descends the stairs towards the empty streets. Without a light to guide herself by or a satellite moon to reflect sunlight, she’s left with only her senses to find her way in the town past her stomach cramps.

With nothing around her, she wonders if perhaps she should go find the owner of the hotel and ask, but perhaps by the rotation of the planet and the way a full day is perceived, she might not get very lucky.

Heading for the street, then, she looks at either side of it and wonders in which direction to go first.

She is in no way expecting the mob.

Or the pitchforks on fire, the only light in the dark night; ambiances of Earth that inhabit a distant corner of space where they shouldn’t even exist.

“Intruder!” they shout when they notice her, in nothing like the calm demeanors she has seen in them during the day. Their faces are a perfect unified mass of decisiveness.

The Doctor gets a hold of her sonic. Mobs, changes in behavior, coincidentally all happening the same day they arrive? She’s not taking any chances. She’s just thankful no one else came down from the room with her.

They surround her to hisses and yells that sound very much like ‘attack now’ and ‘catch the intruder’.

“Hi, yes, sorry. Maybe I _am_ intruding a bit, what I’d like to know is what into? You seem to be awfully preoccupied with your… festivities?”

In other times, she might have said that cheerfully, playing along with the air of daftness she knows she gives off because of the hair and the funny clothes. With fire flaming a foot away from her and angry faces chiseled in bark ready to throw it at her, her tone is cold and patronizing.

“It’s her,” someone says inside the mob. “She’s _taunting_ us!”

“Playing with our pain!”

“Burn her!”

The Doctor swirls to try and find a way out back where she came from, but they have surrounded her. None of this fits into what she knows of the societies that live in the planet. They were supposed to practice peace cohabitation, without escalating conflicts or expressions of violence. Earlier today, it all had fit that mold.

Do they change into the night, like werewolves? Have they been hiding all this time, just waiting for night to fall so they could attack? Do they want _her_ in particular? Have they mistaken her for someone else? Have they assumed she has done something someone else might have?

Have they been taken over by a more aggressive species?

She doesn’t even think. She points her sonic at them and activates it.

The mob reacts faster than she can read the results off of it. Hot flames of fire approach her clothes, her face, and force her to lower her arm and stay still. She grits her teeth.

They all shout their own orders at each other. To burn her. To capture her. To drown her for long and agonizing minutes in the salty sea. To make her pay.

“Pay, for _what_?” she says, louder than any of them. Louder than the fire.

People, being people, use threats on her that work only on others like them. She’s not afraid of dying, not even for reasons this small. Dying is a transaction when she has met her end so many ways, so many times. She doesn’t fear the lack of air in the final moment, she already knows it’s terrifying.

In the split second it takes them to react to her question, she looks at her sonic. Nothing. They are the species they are. No traces of anything else. Just… anger, grief. Alien emotions in these large quantities for a species that roams their planet in relative harmony.

“How dare you mock us?” the mob speaks. “Grab her. She will drown for this.”

Behind her, someone grips both her arms with stiff fingers and pulls hard at her to move. Her sonic falls to the ground. She thrashes to try and fetch it back, but the hands holding her back yank harder.

“Let her go!”

The Doctor looks up from behind curtains of undone blond hair. Bill… Bill has rushed to the end of the stairs, presumably because of the noise outside, and now is involved.

The Doctor uses the distraction to free herself, recover her possessions, and stand far away from the mob, as much as she can.

“Get back inside. I’ll handle this,” she tells Bill.

“You against a whole crowd? I don’t think so.”

“I’m not _joking_ ,” the Doctor almost hisses. “Get back inside.”

Bill hears and doesn’t listen. Bill is seeing a mob, like in the movies she probably loves, and still coming down to the street anyway. Missy runs down there with her. The Doctor sees her, too, but her eyes only ever process Bill.

This was not supposed to happen.

“Take one more step, and this ends here,” the Doctor says.

But both of them come to her side, push their way past the mob to _join_ her.

“This does end here,” Bill says, but not to the Doctor. She faces the mob calmly, yet not fearlessly. No human can be truly fearless, and if they ever truly are, the Doctor lets them know their time inside the box with her is over. “Aren’t you supposed to be all peaceful people and shit? I don’t see that here. What kind of peace shatters at the sight of a newcomer in the night? What kind of _peaceful_ allows this? You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The pitchforks do not move, do not stop pointing at the three of them.

“Uh… In all honesty,” someone in the crowd says, “I think I remember them from today’s market, and I’d never really seen any of them before…”

“They said they were visiting.”

“Yeah, that’s because we _are_ ,” Bill says.

“So it can’t have been her,” the same someone continues, pointing at the Doctor.

Reluctantly, the mob stares into its own heart and dissolves. The pitchforks are lowered, and the fire ceases to illuminate the Doctor’s face. Missy is thankful for that, the Doctor was beginning to burn hotter in her anger than any flame ever could.

“What can’t have been me?” the Doctor asks, trying to sound appeased.

At first, nobody answers. They hold her gaze, still refusing to believe the testimony of one of them and the agreeing mutters that support it, then—

“The disappearance. The death,” they say. “Someone in the town went missing a few days ago. We set a curfew and a few patrols, so we might catch whoever did it at it again.”

“And if it’s not her,” Bill asks, frowning. “Then who? You must have your suspicions, or else you wouldn’t be patrolling like crazy.”

Silence falls again, eyes avoid eyes.

“You came from the slope,” Bill points out, too, looking at the direction of the street where the mop first appeared. “All the way from the cliffs. Why?”

“The hermit,” they say. “The hermit from the stories. When he emerged from his isolation, nothing good ever came to be.”

“You’re… patrolling your streets, placing the blame on an innocent person… because of a _story_?” Bill asks.

“Stories have power,” the Doctor says. She puts her hand on Bill’s shoulder. “Let’s go back now.”

Glaring at the now quiet mob, the Doctor tries to herd back her friends into the hotel. Someone back in the street calls to them.

“Don’t go out into the streets after dark,” they say. “It might not be safe. And we might suspect of you again, this time definitively.”

“Now, wouldn’t that be a charm, huh?” Missy mumbles to herself.

The Doctor notices this is the first time Missy has spoken during the whole exchange. She says nothing. She has enough dealing with the fact that once again, what was supposed to be safe haven to run away from potential danger has turned into another whirlpool of questions that might lead down roads she doesn’t want another companion traveling alone or with her. Not anymore. Not again. Not if she can’t be sure of what’s on the other side of the horizon.

_This planet is too much like Gallifrey._

Beige, orange, red. A peaceful society that only ever pretends to be. Mysteries that are spoken of in the dark of the night, hushedly, hidden from view.

Back inside the room, as they take off their coats again and try to make themselves comfortable for the night, Bill sits on her assigned bed, taking off her boots, and wonders aloud.

“Is it just me or,” she says, grimacing as she struggles to get one boot off, “it really doesn’t fit into the model of society they’d been presenting to follow so far to, y’know, do the whole curfew and horde bit as a form of conflict resolution?”

“People get desperate.” Missy shrugs. “Trauma can really shake you up. And if you’re basically living harmoniously until then, I imagine it can turn you into, well—and I mean no offense by this—a bit of a human being.”

“So you think there really was a murder here?” Bill asks.

“They strongly suspect it,” Missy says. “Would _just_ a rumor be enough to change the entire foundations of life as they know it? I don’t know…”

The Doctor looks at them both, right there, discussing the scant details of what they know as if they were in a detective show.

“Maybe whoever they think was murdered just decided to leave the town,” the Doctor says.

“Without telling anyone?” Bill asks.

“Some people want to leave home without leaving any traces, whatever the reason. Doesn’t mean anyone killed them,” the Doctor says. She desperately wants to believe those words more than she believes Missy’s theories. After all, she did leave her hometown without warning, without goodbyes.

She sits on her bed and gets under the covers, her back turned to Missy and Bill. The sheets are cold and rough at touch, it’ll take a while of just lying there, quiet and still, for them to reflect some of her own body heat back to her.

“Still,” Bill presses on, pulling back her covers as well to get under them. “Something’s cooking here. I can’t wait to get on it.”

Missy’s intake on breath, sharp and too quick, should have been a clue before the Doctor even spoke, turning on the bed to look at them both.

“We should leave this town,” the Doctor says, angry, admitting no rebuke. “Call it a day. We had the day I promised. And you have seen what’s outside the borders of home,” she says to Bill. “Something too vast to ever be controlled or measured or understood.”

She was a fool to think she would find a reprieve, an oasis of true peace in a universe that only ever knows how to fabricate fatality. Taking Bill away from Earth was a mistake. At least on Earth Bill knows how to navigate her own fatalities and the Doctor only ever feels responsible for the alien incursions.

“This ends here,” she says, breathing out and trying to get comfortable on the bed, although she knows she will not sleep much tonight.

“We’re really going to leave without finding out?” Bill asks.

The Doctor herself would have asked that question once. The lack of an answer would have fueled her until she’d found out.

“I told you, down there. Come any closer and it’s over. I can’t guarantee any safety for any of us, with a murderer on the loose and murderous mobs making the rounds on the streets.”

“You just said you didn’t even believe in a murderer,” Bill says, a little bit amused.

The Doctor grits her teeth. Missy finally comes to bed with her before any of this can escalate out of their control.

“How about we deal with all this tomorrow, huh?” she says.

She doesn’t just push the covers away and get in, she flawlessly enters the realm of the bed, puts an arm around the Doctor, and manages with just one simple casual touch they have had millions of times, to remind her of everything that they cannot say out loud to each other.

Such are the secrets they keep.

* * *

In the morning, however, after too many hours without food and going on very little rest, priorities change. Because stomachs growl, the first imperative isn’t taking a very long walk back to the TARDIS but venturing out on the streets in search for food.

The Doctor only ever agrees to the three of them leaving the hotel because it saves time if they can eat as they walk. Yet once they’re holding warm buns of something meaty in their cold reddened hands, she can do very little to stop any _conversation_ from happening around her.

Bill masterfully leans on the wall of some house and asks the stall owner about the curfew, as if she was discussing summer rains and boats drifting out into the sea with them. Nothing out of the ordinary that people don’t know or won’t talk about. Surprisingly, it works.

Missy’s hand grips the Doctor’s wrist and her eyes pierce her own, warningly. Bill goes on, blissfully unaware.

“It’s an awful lot of trouble to go to, isn’t it?” Bill’s still saying. “All those people every night.”

“Until shey’re found… something’ll have to be done to protect everyone. To try and catch whoever took shem away.” The owner sighs. “Elin was very loved around here. Shey wouldn’t just have disappeared.”

Bill glances at the Doctor without saying anything, then asks the owner her question:

“Does anyone know where shey might have been when it… happened?”

The owner clears their throat.

“I heard the beach. Elin lived near the beach, but shey didn’t go down there much.”

“And I imagine no body has been found…” Bill says, voice a bit softer.

They would have had something else to go on with, if they’d had a body. Maybe they have practices in this town, in their society, that allow them to find clues better than on Earth. Or maybe it just would have given them truths they can’t depend on now.

The owner frowns at Bill.

“What’s all this to you, anyway?” they ask. “You don’t know the family. You don’t know Elin. What do you care?”

Bill barely manages to stutter out a response. The Doctor covers the space between them, stops in front of Bill, and stands up to the owner as Missy walks away with Bill.

“Just trying to make sense of things, that’s all,” the Doctor says coldly. “Thank you for your time.”

She retreats to join the other two, far enough away from the stalls now. Carefully looking behind her at all times, she maneuvers all of them into a corner of an alley, where the light is particularly poor and nobody seems to be in a hurry to enter.

“We’re attracting too much attention,” she says. She takes in a deep breath and tries with all her hearts to appeal to her kindness and not her fear now. “I know you think this is an experience you want. I know you think that because this is not your home, because I promised, you’ll be safe no matter what. But all those people see is intruders to tolerate until we become suspects to them.”

“They can be suspects to us, too,” Bill says. “We didn’t do anything, but some of them are clearly to blame for it. They must be.”

“No, they’re not. They’re just people. And these are their problems to solve. I can’t risk us getting too involved in them just because it’s _fun_ for you to try and solve them. I need you to understand that.”

“I said I’d take care of her,” Missy says, meaning Bill. “We could branch out, see what we hear. Bill and I can investigate as a pair. Sherlock and Watson.”

She smiles, defusing a tension that in the Doctor’s chest is ever-present, threatening to burst when and how it shouldn’t.

“This? Taking this like a game you can play with the lives of other people, _real_ people? It hardly ever ends well,” the Doctor asks. She always knows how it will end. How it always does. She’s played the game often enough herself.

“Because you can’t predict this. You can’t… assign blame on them already. Or decide that there is a murder just because they fear there was one,” Missy says. “You said it yourself on the TARDIS, they’re peaceful. Maybe they just got scared and are looking for answers that they can’t see because they’re not used to this.” She looks into the Doctor’s eyes. “How will we ever know if we fly off?”

After a few seconds, it is clear to them all what the answer to that is. Missy laughs a little and taps on Bill’s shoulder for them to get going, for them to get back into the dim light of the sun on the streets.

But the Doctor shakes her head at them.

“No,” she says. “If we’re doing this, Bill comes with me.”

She won’t take any chances at random. Not this time, not ever. Not when someone else’s life is on the line and she will be the one to stand and watch it burn away in a wind she can’t stop or catch or so much as measure.

On their way to mingle as part of the busy town for the day, mindful of the fact that they have less hours to work with than on Earth, Bill watches the Doctor walk fast, her eyes following every single motion around them, and can’t help but feel just as she did when she was a kid and Moira tried to keep the whole world from getting near her.

“I’m really not a damsel in distress here,” she says after a while. “I can help. If this is what you did, before… whatever happened. I can help you with it.”

The Doctor turns to her, face hard as stone. For a moment, Bill isn’t sure of what’s going to happen. Then the words hit her, and they aren’t stone, they’re … mud. Wet, sad. Attempts.

“That’s never at doubt,” she says. “Ever, Bill. You can trust me on that.”

“It’s a little hard to believe that this is still about safety. If it was, you wouldn’t have let me come. So why did you if you were just going to bail halfway through?”

It’s just about a whole lot more than safety, or helping. Bill knows about the years, about the names, but she doesn’t know the _meaning_ of either. The weight. Humans dream of immortality as if it could ever solve any of their collective or individual problems, when all immortality ever does is shine a magnifying glass on them all. To either burn or amplify.

“I made you a promise and I’d like to keep it more than just the once. Because _this_ is what I did. Really. All the time. Me and a human friend, all day, every day,” the Doctor says. “But I’ve lost friends before. To _this._ So I guess I’m just scared. I guess I don’t trust good faith judgements anymore, Bill. Even if I really, really want to—for you.”

Bill smiles softly and turns it all around on her once more.

“Then why are we still here? If you want to leave, if you really think we’ll be safer that way, why are we still walking in the opposite direction?”

“Because it’s good that you still believe in good faith judgements,” the Doctor says; she mutters: “Because, deep down, I want to believe in them now, too. Again. I really, really do.”

Following the veiled inkling given to them by that stall owner that the missing person was last seen on a beach shey didn’t visit often, they find themselves standing at the end of a street, where before them there is only sand and stones descending in a smooth curve until the sea meets them halfway.

No natural barriers between town and shore, no port here. Bill can see ship-shaped forms not far away to her right, hear the clanking noises the waves rip out of the hulls. But here it’s all out in the open.

“Anyone would have been able to sneak in here,” she says. “There are no streetlights in the whole town, no moon. When it got dark enough, anyone could have done anything and then dragged the body to sea.”

The strong scent of the ocean reaches her in bursts, when it drives closer to her in waves that sometimes look grayer than green.

“It would have washed up by now,” the Doctor says. Her eyes have fixated on the coming and going on the waves, silently measuring the tide. Without a moon to speak of, some other forces operate, yet she’s still fairly sure that the sea behaves enough like the seas she knows best. “And made all of this… so much easier than it has to be.”

Bill kicks a few stones with the tip of her foot, looking around.

“And if you’re right?” she says.

“About what?”

“About there being no murder.”

“We’ve been told the last place shey were seen, plus a piece of local information that it wasn’t a frequented place for shem, but that doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“No, but what _if_ they’re calling it a murder and it’s just a kidnapping or something? Some… old feud.” Bill begins gesturing, pacing, as her mind vocalizes her quickest thoughts. “They’re peaceful, that’s fact—still, should we presume they don’t _feel_ negative emotions? So what if something happened? And it got out of hand. The kidnapper slash murderer slash whatever wouldn’t know how to handle really negative emotions. They might just have dealt with it by… not arguing, by eliminating all external pressure and just… cornering Elin and themselves both somewhere they could fully express—”

Bill stops herself at once the second she realizes where she is going.

“And perhaps even killed shem there,” the Doctor finishes.

“I hope not… Just because they _could_ doesn’t mean they _did._ I want to believe that. I want to believe we’ll find Elin alive.”

The Doctor takes a few steps towards Bill so she can look her in the eye.

“Going through with this,” she says, “means you don’t know—ever—what you’re going to find. People will depend on you finding out anyway. People will depend on you being a pillar for them when what you find out isn’t what they wanted, what they’d believed. You need to be ready for that, Bill. We don’t know anything yet, not even enough to reach the wrong conclusions.”

Bill holds her gaze.

Even if she didn’t know about the gravestones, the sheer display of old age in those eyes would have been a clue. All of these conversations would have, too. The Doctor in herself stands as testimony to what happens to a mind that lives on. Something shatters at some point, Bill has seen. It shatters and despite the many attempts to glue it back together, the cracks remain, visible, pushing out to shatter again.

She wonders what would become of her if she reached out now and tried to recompose some of it on her own, where others more experienced than her have failed. She wonders if time and space is worth it, truly, when you can have all of it forever and it slowly turns into routine. Would Bill appreciate daily life, if it wasn’t all she was forced to have for the duration of her existence?

“Doctor…” she says now. Out of the corner of her eye, a figure. “We’re not alone.”

They both turn around. Someone else has come down to the beach, a more distant corner of it. The wind hits harder there because of the slight elevation, and the clothes on the newcomer move freely in it.

Bill and the Doctor exchange a glance and wordlessly approach the figure, walking in perfect synchrony on the sand. The closer they get, the clearer it becomes that perhaps what they expected is not all there is to be learned, after all.

“Hi,” the Doctor says. She wrinkles her eyes in the wind. “I’m the Doctor, this is Bill. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Go away…”

“No, it’s okay,” Bill says. “We came to help. We heard someone disappeared here, and we were wondering if you might have seen anything or…”

“What’s your name?” the Doctor asks softly, when the figure’s head turns away from them back into the eternal waves of the dark sea.

“Chalise.”

“Like.. like the room in the hotel?” Bill says.

“Like in the old stories.” When the newcomer turns a bit to look at them and sees their strange clothes, their confused stances, she tells them. “Chalise lulled the sun god to sleep, waited by the earth every night, by the sea. No matter the weather, no matter the personal cost. Chalise loved the sun and always knew it would come back to her. The sun always did.”

“But not her sun god,” Bill finishes.

“My parents just liked the name. I don’t think they understood that story’s about loss and foolish sacrifices.” She gulps. “Just like they don’t understand now… what it feels like.”

Bill and the Doctor look at each other. Indeed, this is not who they expected to find at all.

The Doctor uncomfortably shifts her feet on the sand, sinking on it.

“You knew Elin?” she asks.

Hundreds of years of asking versions of that question pile onto her now like gravestone upon gravestone on her sternum. She hasn’t always known how to ask it right, not even after she has been on the receiving end of it herself. But by the stars, that painful past tense ends up seeping in, after a long enough while. After a long enough string of names that follow it.

At first, Chalise remains silent. Everything around the three of them is natural noise, encompassing every last element. The wind blows, the sea fights it in its endeavor to come out on top, and life goes on beyond all of that, bustling, much softer. Every second of that background of sound is a pounding heartbeat of anticipation in Bill’s chest, in the Doctor’s.

“I was going to marry shem…” Chalise’s voice breaks.

Bill’s face freezes.

“I’m really sorry…” she manages.

“What’s happened here is awful,” the Doctor says, “but anything you can tell us is going to be incredibly helpful towards finding out where Elin might be.”

Bill stares at the Doctor, she watches her say those words, putting every last bit of emotion into each and every last one of them, and she forgets what she was going to do, how hard she was going to fight to see this through to the end. One relative to the victim has come through and now she no longer has to.

“Did you see anything from your house? Someone told us you live nearby.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Chalise says, voice small and shaky. “Everything was normal. I loved _shem._ Shey loved _me…_ We were going to get _married_! Everything was normal and I said I was going to go to sleep and shey said shey’d stay downstairs for a little longer and—”

A sob shatters through her statement like a lightning fractures the stormy sky.

Bill can’t help it. She puts a hand on Chalise’s arm.

“Next thing I knew, it was morning. And I was alone.” Dark tears stream down Chalise’s face. “And Elin was gone.” For a moment, Chalise bites on her bark-like lip and regains her composure. “They said shey’d come down to the beach, that someone had seen shem here, that that… hermit from the old stories had come for shem…”

“And then the patrolling started,” the Doctor says, nodding.

“But it’s just a myth. And my Elin never went down to the beach. Shey always said shey were scared of what hid in the water…” Chalise mutters wetly.

Bill squeezes Chalise’s upper arm.

“We’ll figure this out. Maybe it’s just a terrible joke someone’s decided to play on you.”

The Doctor opens her eyes wide.

“Bill’s right,” she says. “Any enemies you two might have had? Anybody that might have wanted to hurt you by pulling a joke like that without actually doing anything to harm Elin?”

Chalise looks emptily at them both, then back at the sea.

“This town lived in peace, like we’re supposed to, until Elin was taken away. The word ‘enemy’ only exists in our languages historically, because we learn when we’re young of barbaric species who kill each other in the name of enmity.” She sighs. “And now the same is happening here, and no one’s even realizing it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The new planet and town (and in a way also the story) are a little bit based on _Broadchurch_ , because I was watching it while writing and got inspired; the cliffs and beach in the show are stunning. And it felt kind of fitting since both Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant were in it.


	10. A sinful mastery

They leave Chalise be, because there is little else they can do or say to comfort her with what they know so far, and make the walk back into town to reconvene with Missy. She’s lounging by a water fountain that barely has any water left at the bottom. Her sunglasses are up in her hair and she’s impatiently waiting for Bill and the Doctor to finally reach her.

“Anything remotely interesting?” she asks with a full grin on her face.

The Doctor says nothing, just hides her chin into her red scarf and plops down next to Missy. Bill remains on her feet.

“Elin had a fiancée,” she says. “And whatever did happen, it must have happened at night, after all. But whether at the beach or not, well… That’s more a rumor than anything else. The fiancée doesn’t know who said it. It’s just a thing that’s going around. Oh, and apparently the hermit that everyone assumes did it? Doesn’t exist. It’s from old stories, the fiancée said.”

Missy’s grin turns dark for a second.

“They fear him a whole lot for a lad who doesn’t exist,” she says. “I talked to quite a few people, quiet people—the ones that don’t make much noise. It seems that for as long as people can remember, nobody actually goes all the way up to the cliffs. _Because_ of those hermit stories. They go near them, especially now that they’re patrolling. But not _on_ them.”

The Doctor glances up at Missy.

“Any specific stories they might have mentioned?”

“I assumed they didn’t involve good things, precisely. But no. Nobody actually _told_ me the stories.”

“Question is,” Bill says, “do _we_ assume they’re true and the hermit exists?”

Missy gives out a short, unassuming laugh.

“The question is,” she says, “do we pay those cliffs a visit? What conclusion can we draw from a tale and collective suspicion?” Missy slaps her hands together. “We need proof, ladies and non-binary pals.”

“I mean,” Bill says, “if there is someone living up there, don’t we owe it to them to sort of just _ask_? Everyone’s just blaming them for this, when nobody actually knows a single thing other than someone disappeared overnight.”

The Doctor breathes out.

“And if whoever’s up there, if there _is_ indeed someone, turns out to be a murderer?” she asks, bluntly. “It can go two ways.”

“You can’t judge people like that. Like they judged you out on that street.”

“Yes, I can. And I do. Quite often, and quite well, most of the time. You have no idea how many times I’ve run into myths become reality,” the Doctor says. “I didn’t want to believe a place like this had turned this sour, but it has. We don’t know what’s up there. We don’t know what happened to Elin. And we _don’t_ need to find out, Bill. We could go somewhere else.” The fact that she’s losing her harshness, word after word, transitioning into a soft pleading, makes her sentences all the much harder to stomach. “Because I really don’t think we’re going to find shem alive. And the more we find out, the less I trust we will, the more I feel danger coming. At us. At _you._ ”

Bill stares—almost glares—into her eyes.

“I don’t know or care what you used to do before. Is this what you do _now_? Stick around long enough to get scared, and then throw all your tactical advantage away and take off, leaving people behind to deal with things you know they can’t alone?” she asks. “Is this what you would have done on Earth, with me, if there had been any real danger in my shop, at St. Luke’s?”

Bill stares into the Doctor’s old eyes until seconds tick away any hope she has of getting an answer out of her. Then, she walks.

When she’s out of earshot, the Doctor exhales deeply.

“She’s right,” Missy says casually, looking at the empty space Bill has left behind. “Even now, when you’re fighting it harder than I’ve ever seen you fight anything—including me—you respond when the universe calls, sweetheart. You respond and try to help even if you know you can’t.” Missy puts a hand on the Doctor’s chest and says: “That’s what you do for us all. That’s who the Doctor is.”

Neither of them say anything for a few seconds.

“I can almost see you with that widow, your pain,” Missy continues. “Don’t tell me you’ll really leave her without answers. You never do that.”

“The widow—the fiancée, I mean…” the Doctor finally mutters. “She told us a story from the old tales about a sun god. Sun gods, hermits. It reeks of Time Lord, Missy. I can’t let her get near those cliffs. I just can’t. This is as far as I go.”

Missy puts an arm around her.

“They’d never come here, sweetheart,” she says. “Too damn peaceful, too damn boring. Any old one of us would go mad in a place like this.” She laughs softly, close to the Doctor’s ear. “Look at you, half an hour in an empty room and you leapt out of bed to go fetch food because you were bored out of your skull.”

They breathe quietly together for some time, then Missy stands up.

“Come on. Let’s find Bill. Let’s give her her mystery adventure for once. I’ve got both your backs.”

Missy reaches out a hand for the Doctor to take.

“It’s not them,” Missy says, serious this time. “You know it isn’t.”

“Do I?” the Doctor says, but she takes her hand and stands up with her. “You’ve said it. The universe calls and I respond. Even now. They exploited that once, why not do it to me again?”

Missy stares at her, holding her hand tight in hers.

“Because they’d be really stupid, and they know this, if they thought that hurting you in the same way now they were going to get what they want.”

“They never will with me,” the Doctor mumbles as they begin moving in the direction where Bill had left earlier. “But I can’t ever let them harm my friends in the process. Not ever. Not because of another stupid mistake.”

Once they’re reunited with Bill, deciding to stay is simpler than holding a discussion on the matter. After all, in order to get back to the TARDIS, they must take the same path they would if they were to stroll up all the way to the cliffs. Seeing the TARDIS stand mightily on the crescent slope of the cliff, Missy and Bill stop by it, neither walking on nor remaining on the invisible divider the TARDIS sets between forward and back, to let the Doctor make her final decision, but she doesn’t keep them long.

“You do as I say,” the Doctor tells them. “And stay behind me at all times. Okay?”

Bill nods, falling into step between the Doctor and Missy, who follows her closely. At times, she’s not sure she’s being escorted, routed, or ushered. Or if it’s worth it, all of this. Arguing with an equal that doesn’t act as such when she should. Facing up to a mystery that’s making them miserable, the people in town most of all. She’s being carefully placed inside a cage, for her own protection, so that she can witness it first-hand, but that’s not the reality of the world. Safaris aren’t savannahs, after all.

Silence acts as their companion for the rest of the climb.

As soon as they have ascended to the top of the first collection of cliffs, the stable plainness that crowns the long lines of rock that separate earth from sea, a nondescript mass of metal breaks the line between ground and sky in the far-off distance.

It takes them some time to reach it up close and discover that, despite its ruinous appearance, once it might have been a functioning spaceship. The Doctor passes a hand over its outer layers, and thick sand, conglomerated in clumps, falls to the dirt on top of the cliff.

Bill notices that despite the obvious wear that makes it hard to time the technology, and despite the sand that suggests it has been there a truly long time, the landing gear is deployed but not _inserted_ into the ground, not taken over by the geological passage of time. She points it out aloud.

“So it can’t have been here as long as it seems,” she finishes.

The Doctor crouches by the spaceship, next to Bill. She touches a metal panel, and it crumbles under her fingers, with a loud thud.

“These thrusters don’t operate with machinery found in this planet. In this _galaxy,_ ” she says.

“Another time traveler?” Bill asks, crossing her arms.

She looks at Missy, since the Doctor is trying to inspect the technology further, but Missy’s brow is furrowed and she looks exactly as she might if she were lost in thought, not hearing any of this.

“Maybe,” the Doctor mumbles. “It doesn’t make _sense_.”

“It does,” Missy finally says, her voice still sounding a bit distant. “If the hermit from the stories was just someone nobody in town could rationalize. And they just created notions of fear around him.”

“Still doesn’t explain Elin…” the Doctor says, standing up straight again.

Some clanking coming from the inside of the ship interrupts her next thought. She lifts a finger and opens her eyes wide before either Bill or Missy can move or say a word.

“I’ll go in first, see what’s inside,” she whispers. “When I give you a signal, you follow. Not before.”

“Okay,” Bill says. “Which signal?”

“I don’t know. ‘Long live King Arthur.’”

Missy half-snorts.

They watch the Doctor surround the ship until she presumably finds a ramp to lower so she can access it. For a few breaths, they remain quiet, much too aware that they are here after a murderer and that the Doctor has gone in first as a precautionary measure. They have _let_ the Doctor go in first alone.

Seconds pass and their hearts grow heavy in their chests.

“You think she’s alright?” Bill asks. “I can’t hear anything.”

“She’ll be fine,” Missy says, although she’s feeling as expectant as she imagines Bill is. “She might be small, but she can handle herself in a fight.”

But Bill shakes her head.

“Yeah, not good enough. Too many stories about men in the dark, sorry.”

She runs out of Missy’s reach before Missy can grab her or yell for her to get back. Bill’s hunches come and go, they’re not dependable, because nothing ever really is, but she trusts fear in situations like this. And the Doctor’s trapped in a spaceship with a hermit that might have killed or kidnapped someone. Or might not. But Bill’s brain just jumps straight to _Doctor_ \+ _dangerous_ = _gotta go in and help._ A reflex.

Going up the open ramp, she reminds herself not to ever think again that the Doctor’s protective methods are extreme.

Then, in broken messes of ornaments and clothes and smells, the Doctor is standing right by a tall man in ragged clothes and long dark hair and beard who is pressed against her, snogging her.

Before she can lunge in to grab at her friend, Bill hears Missy’s terrifying chuckle behind her stretch out for a couple of seconds.

“A thousand bloody years and you just… go in and smooch our oldest friend like it’s a party,” Missy says to… the hermit? “You’re an idiot.”

“Sorry, _what_?” Bill says as the man slowly disentangles himself from a very confused-looking Doctor. “You three know each other?”

“YEARS I HAVE GONE WITHOUT CONTACT WITH CIVILIZATION,” the man yells at Missy, “and you’re telling me the first person I come across is _the Doctor_?”

“… I feel like—I feel like somebody should have sat either of you down at some point and just…” Bill makes an intense face at both the man and Missy. “— _told you_ that you’re not supposed to use _snogging_ as a _greeting_.”

Neither pay her or the Doctor any mind now. The two of them laugh evilly in perfect synchrony as if they had timed it, as if they somehow had orchestrated this moment in time and space to have them as an audience. Bill doesn’t know who to look at. She chooses the Doctor, and finds the same level of utter puzzlement in her face.

The man chuckles for a tad longer than Missy does.

“Well, I’m not going to retain the memory of actually snogging her, so…” he says.

“Yeah, and I will, but, dear, that was—now, that was something.” Missy giggles like a schoolgirl with a crush on an unattainable student. Slowly, she takes a few steps closer to him and lifts up a hand to very softly stroke his cheek, and press her fingers onto his beard. “What happened to your beautiful round face, love?”

He chuckles low down in his throat as well, meeting her halfway as he comes awfully close to her, not hesitating to put a hand around her waist and pull her all the way to him.

“Apparently,” he says, surveying the face on Missy without a single ounce of shame on him, so zealously that it almost makes Bill’s eyes pop out of their sockets, “I lost it to cheekbones and eyelashes.”

“You did always have quite nice eyelashes,” Missy replies.

Bill gulps and recoils to whisper into the Doctor’s ear:

“What the fuck is happening?”

The Doctor has to make an effort to remember how to speak as well. Bill can hear her trying to swallow a few times before she finds the words.

“That’s… Missy. In the past. Our species changes. A bit. Sometimes.”

“Genders?” Bill says.

When Clara had sort of said that the Doctor she’d known went by _he/him_ , Bill’s head had needed a minute. She’d just imagined that the Doctor adhered to Bill’s own understanding of gender, of being trans, and that probably the Doctor wasn’t out to Clara in the past. She hadn’t imagined, well, literal changes of _face._

“Nah, she’s still—” The Doctor frowns and turns to Missy, who is still very much coiled around the hermit, fluttering her eyelashes at him. “Missy, what’s your gender? There was one, wasn’t there? What was it?”

Both the man’s and Missy’s faces turn towards Bill and the Doctor.

“Quite a few, actually,” they both say at the same time, promptly returning to their affairs.

“She’s still all her genders. Just gift-wrapped a bit differently every time,” the Doctor finishes telling Bill.”

“Cool, so you change bodies,” Bill says, still unable to look away from whatever’s happening in front of her. “And does this… happen normally for all of you or…?”

Suddenly, quite very suddenly and without anything prompting it, Bill’s mind is picturing two different versions of the Doctor in bodies rather similar to the one she’s sporting now, doing exactly what Missy and this strange man are in the present. She shakes her head to diffuse the mental image.

“Er… no,” the Doctor answers. “They’re a bit of a special case. That’s how they say hello to each other.”

Bill snorts in amusement.

She has seen Missy flirt with most people in most places, not in an obvious, terrible or awkward way that made anyone uncomfortable, not even in a way that actively sought anything, but definitely in a way that made it very clear that Missy _could_ get dates with just about anyone if they was willing.

“And goodbye,” Bill replies. “And everything in between.”

“Yeah. Little bit.”

The Doctor wrinkles her face, cocking it a little to the side, trying to understand the workings of this whole exuberant moment Missy is having with herself. She shakes her head after a few seconds and tries to clear it. They’re here for one reason and one reason only, and that is most certainly not a much-too-friendly reunion.

She waddles to them, cuts all the way between their chests with her hands to separate them, and clears her throat.

“Right, so. Bill, this is the Master. This is Bill. We all know and love Missy.” She takes in a deep breath. “We’re here investigating a murder…” It’s going to hurt to have to say it. “And you’re the primary suspect.”

“Is that so?” he says.

She’s not very sure what his gut reaction is going to be to that. His words seem mystical enough for her to be able to doubt him. And the person she remembers from very long ago left her with the impression that they’d meet again in … different circumstances. She hopes for those circumstances now.

She really, really hopes for gentleness. For understanding, at least. Cooperation.

Instead, laughter erupts out of his lungs like it used to, and he throws his head back to revel in it further. Worn by time, he may not look like the mastermind she remembers, but he’s acting like it. And the only thing she can think of, in her hearts as well as her mind, is to get a tight grip on Bill’s wrist and take a few steps back. So she does.

Especially when Missy aligns with his stance, side by side with him, and grins her wicked grin at _her_.

The Doctor’s fingers on Bill’s wrist tighten.

The two Masters advance on them. She has dreamed long nightmares in which this happened, nightmares in which she trusted them for many days and many years, and then the moment came in which her compassion, her stupidity, was taken to the extreme.

There _was_ a Time Lord on this ship, on these cliffs.

And now the Doctor’s sure it was this Time Lord who murdered Elin.

It’s all she can do to not let her rage become tears.

She shields Bill with her own body. Because the last time they took a companion away from her will be the _last time they do that._ Bill doesn’t understand. She wouldn’t. She can’t.

The Doctor tries to. The Master was different once. But how long ago? Long enough ago for him to have turned back into a monster? And Missy… The Doctor’s eyes find her. Missy’s change with the light in the spaceship—the same spaceship, she realizes now, as all those years ago in a barren binary star system—and the Doctor asks into them: _are you really on his side?_ Without an answer, another question: _how can you be, after all this time?_

And the questions Missy asks deep into the eyes of her Doctor are not for her, they are meant for Missy herself. She sees it, clear as morning and dark as the ocean below them. Bill and the Doctor, herself and the Master.

One way is the way she decided she’d travel. The other is the way she dreams about, the way that wakes her up in the middle of the night, that fills her up with old adrenaline and the sound of drums. The way she fears and aches for. And now it’s not a dream. Now she can have it. She just has to _take_ it.

And it’ll be hers forever. Again.

But, and this has always been Missy’s mistake in her long run for evil, she is looking into the Doctor’s eyes. And, right now, those eyes have never terrified Missy more. Those eyes have never conveyed so much terror themselves.

Missy puts a hand on her own hip.

“Well?” she asks casually. “You’re just going to accuse him of having done it and that’s it?”

The Master ignores them both. He picks up something from the floor to look at. There are many, many things on his floor.

“Just so that it’s clear, I haven’t left this ship in a very long time,” he grumbles. “And I don’t mean to start doing that now. So, sorry. Not me.”

“Well, you’re going to have to,” the Doctor says.

She crosses her arms as she leans on one of his walls and, as soon as she does, recoils from it immediately when she realizes how sticky it is from ancient filth. All around the ship, he’s let the mess spread: shelves half-built, objects that should be on them yet await to be picked up from the disgusting floors. Even the shell of what one day will be a TARDIS, in a corner, small and cylindrical, its internal dimensions probably left to expand for many years still until they’re ready. When they are, he will filth them up, too. It’s what he does.

“Someone might have just died,” Bill intervenes slowly. “And they all think it’s you down there. They’re scourging every street, and part of the cliffs, looking for you. At least prove to them that you didn’t do it. It’s the least anyone can do, showing them that compassion.”

The Master sneers loudly.

“Compassion,” he repeats. “I see you’ve trained her thoroughly, Doctor.”

“Compassion, yeah. And she didn’t need to. I came all compassionate like this from home.”

“Did you, little pet?” He asks it without emotion. In different times, there would have been so much withheld desire to tease, to poke, to destroy, in those four words. Now, they’re a mere shell of who he was. “You walk with her, you follow her rules. Has she learned to let the leash a little bit loose with the years? Or is she still holding you tight by her side?”

He nods at the Doctor’s hand on Bill’s wrist.

“Still, I don’t really need to ask, do I?” And he chuckles viciously.

Bill’s very core drives her forward in an instant when she’s not thinking straight. She lunges at him. The Doctor’s arm cuts her breath, hard and strong against her chest.

And Missy. The future of this _creature_ in front of them all. Missy stands by him, holds _him_ off. How can they be the same to Bill’s eyes, when Bill loves her and hates him?

He just laughs. He laughs. Maybe he even knows. Maybe it’s obvious, the game and where each player stands. Bill’s too new to it. She hardly understands the rules most of the time.

“She teaches you her ways so well, you all fall prey to them. Compassion is nothing but a farce, a lie you all tell yourselves if you succumb to your rage in the end. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

The Doctor stares at him. That voice should have carried something within. But devoid of _any_ thing, she can’t trust it. Her Master always spat emotion at her.

She turns to Bill.

“This is what he does. Don’t listen to him, listen to me.” She glances up at Missy, hoping for the support she always has found in her until this point. But Missy is lost to her right now. Missy’s still deciding. The Doctor should, too. This Master isn’t gloriously vanquishing anything, he’s not destroying, he’s not standing on ruins, he’s not himself. But if he’s doing this… “He’s not safe to be around, not for you. I think he might have really killed Elin, and there’s no way to tell what he’ll do if you cross him, Bill. I don’t trust him.”

“This is what you were so afraid of before, isn’t it?” Bill asks her softly, so the other two won’t hear. It helps to focus on this, the unspoken. Rather than the enormous desire she has to turn back and do what she knows she shouldn’t to him because it’s not right.

“Not exactly,” the Doctor says in the same tone. “In a way, maybe,” she corrects. She shakes her head, driving many other thoughts away. “I need you to get out there. I need to figure out what to do with… all of this.”

“It’s too much for you to handle alone, Doctor.”

“I know,” the Doctor says. “But I won’t risk you. If you hear too much noise, if you get a bad feeling, run for the TARDIS. And hide there. I will find you.”

“And Missy?” Bill asks after a beat.

The Doctor says nothing, and Bill suspects that it’s because she doesn’t know. She really doesn’t know if this version of her, this old version that has been accused of murder, might be dragging Missy away from her.

When Bill disappears down the ramp, the Doctor breathes out, easy, and walks up to Missy. Missy, first. Missy, always. So they’d said. Once and many times. If that still stands now…

“Explain this to me,” she says. “Have you been _lying_ to me since we landed? Has all of this been—?”

“No! Bloody hell, no.” Missy reacts quickly.

“Two of the same timestream crossing,” the Master says, bored. He leans on the old controls the same way he used to, lazily and elegantly at once. “I’ll forget all of it, she’ll retain it. Did you _really_ graduate the Academy?”

“I’m very pissed off right now, so I’d suggest you keep that mouth shut unless you want me to punch it closed,” the Doctor says without breaking a sweat. “I’ve wanted to do that for years and today looks like a very good day to allow myself the indulgence.”

“Feisty,” Missy adds.

“You _shut up_ too!” the Doctor says, holding her head in her hands and beginning to pace around a metal floor that replicates the sound of her footsteps and gives her déjà vu in the shape of old memories she doesn’t want in her head anymore. “In fact, everyone shut up!”

These floors, time ago. And she’s standing in the very same crossroads, a few twists in time and space later, further. With two of the same idiot and drained of the patience she had then, three bodies ago, which wasn’t a lot to start with.

He’s cluttered it up so much, it’s impossible to determine just how long he’s been living in the spaceship that took off as her TARDIS did. They’d blown up the second spaceship on her flight off the planet, and each had gone their own separate ways, and she’d thought then she was marching to her death. She thought they both were, in a way, because that Master was traveling alone without machinery that could access the time vortex. And yet here he is, where and when he shouldn’t—couldn’t possibly be—and looking not a day older, except for the hair, the beard, and the haggard clothes.

She’d dreamed of this, once. But not like it’s happening.

She thought with Missy in her life now, it never would.

In the mess of clothes that reek of loneliness, the shards and fragments of bowls shaped out of dry mud, the Doctor finds colors that do not look old, or ragged, or worn. Colors better preserved than the ship itself.

On a shelf, draped carefully on a corner, the flag the Master had found forever ago. The flag of human victory and a republic long dead.

She lets herself be drawn to it, lets herself pick it up.

“You… kept this?”

“Came with the ship,” he growls, looking the other way.

She trusts with all her hearts that this flag being here as something cherished means she was wrong in assuming, in judging without proof.

“You never told me,” the Doctor says to Missy now.

“We all have lives we don’t talk about. Maybe this is mine.”

She trusts that this flag being here after all this time and suffering for the Master means Missy stands where she always has. At her side. Or close enough that it makes no difference.

“But it’s not, is it?” the Doctor almost whispers. “You’ve had worse and you’ve told me about them all.”

“I’m sorry,” Missy says, barely audibly. Her eyes meet the Doctor’s without nothing in the way. “I didn’t know how. It had nothing to do with you.”

In that very second, Missy might be about to tell her anyway. What she remembers. The past of this Master, her own history. But the Master slams his hand on the controls and faces them both.

“You come in here,” the Master says. “You always just _come in._ Like it costs nothing, Doctor. I’m a murderer? Fine. Been called worse. They’ll get over it. They always do. So do you, eventually.” He waves nonchalantly at Missy to prove his point. “Just leave that flag alone. There haven’t been many chances to throw it away.”

The Doctor steps closer to him, her face losing that hint of repulsion and terror that has been chasing her since London, months and worlds ago.

“You really haven’t left here in a very long time, have you?” she says to him.

And she sees now, the state he’s in. She remembers she stranded him, because he asked, in a ship that could travel in hyperspace but never in time, with a TARDIS that would take too many years to be functional. He must have found a way to timetravel, in the end, but in the condition the ship is currently in, she’s not sure it ever will even take off again. And as to the way he looks… Age may not have mellowed him, but there are other consequences to the passage of time that always show in a face, in a body. In a mind.

Bill was right all along, they don’t know the whole story. They can’t judge someone just because they seem like the obvious choice. Not even if they have been all the previous times before.

The Doctor holds a fistful of the flag in her hand.

“Are you still the same person who found this?” she asks him, face to face.

_Have you changed so much again that I can’t trust you?_

“Why don’t you ask her?” He cocks his head towards Missy.

“Because the question’s for you?” Missy tells him patronizingly. “Seriously, did _you_ graduate the Academy or cheat out of it?”

That angers him enough to grant them an answer.

“What do you want of me? To go and talk to them? To go and talk to the family who may have just lost someone?” He laughs. “They’re already terrified of me, that’ll be _spectacularly_ stupid of you to suggest.”

“Talk to us first,” the Doctor says. “All of us. Maybe you have seen something useful that may help us figure this out.”

Why he agrees, he can’t tell. Not now. Perhaps some truth is concealed in what Missy said. He’s seen the Doctor, and his own impulses that stemmed from that have driven him forward, even when he didn’t know who stood before him. Now that he does, the promise she presents to him of a hopeful solution becomes what he chooses to hear. It’s partly all that he has in years. Hers is partly the only one he has in years.

She goes down the ramp first, her back turned to him like it’s always been. She gives him the chance to stick a knife in her, like she always has. And like he always does, he makes himself small behind her. He follows. This time he’s not up to the theatrics that he’s always created to maximize himself when he knows how small he is, how small he’s seen by her.

He doesn’t perceive the familiarity of a confined space fading away into the open air until he’s standing against the soft yet full force of the sea breeze. Until the planet he’s lived in twice and yet only experienced once reveals itself before him. And the reality of self-isolation grinds down on his chest, electrical and sharp, a blade about to tear him open.

He can’t even remember why he remained inside his ship, not when the sea flows in greeting only a few hundred feet below, and beautiful stretches of earth exist for him to walk and run and lay on.

Inside him, something darkens, something pains him anew. The Doctor and that new pet of hers stand away from his ship. Her hands are up in the air, she gestures widely, her face scrunched into a million different expressions. Deep inside him, the Master remembers why he never left the ship.

He leaves it fully now to join Missy’s quiet mulling, closer to the edge of the cliff. She, too, has closed her eyes to the world and is drinking in the salt of the winds.

They are one and the same. He understands better than he’d like. Self-isolation, at least, brought blissful ignorance of the world and society he leeched time and space off of.

“You’re probably here for answers, but I’m afraid… I can give you none.”

“I don’t know where I’m going when I step off this planet,” Missy replies without opening her eyes, without facing him.

“But you do know where _I_ went.” He pauses, he gazes upon her, inquisitive. “Tell me this, is it worth it? All of it?” Missy remains quiet, tense next to him. Her mouth is a thin pink line. “I’m not going to remember any of this. When you leave, you take your answers away, whether you’ve shared them or not, but mine? Those leave with you. So tell me, please, _Master,_ have you found your goodness to be worth _her_?” Calmly, slyly, the Master smiles. “That’s all I want to know.”

“My worth?” Missy laughs, almost as evilly as she used to when she was still him. She turns her head towards him to hold his gaze. “Oh, love. I’m worth _nothing._ My goodness is not worth _anything._ Not to her, not to anyone.” She looks away, back at the sea, endlessly dark before them both. “Good for the sake of conformity isn’t good. I do what I do because I _believe._ ”

“And what do you do, Missy? Huh?” It’s not said antagonistically, he’s just tired. He says it with the exhaustion of a person that has lived too long to know anything anymore. “What is it that you do that makes everything else you’ve done okay?”

In her pause, he hears the Doctor’s own hesitation. The weight that he imagines goodness brings to a soul that battles indecision, that carries it all the time so no one else should. He is smart enough not to wonder if he has ever sounded like that.

Missy faces him fully now, in body and face. Her hands dangle by her sides as she does.

“I… try. I just _try._ ” She looks him straight in the eye for a halting moment complete with the sound of breathing and truth. “But it doesn’t make it okay. I don’t think it ever will.”

She manages a brief soft understanding smile his way.

“So then what is the point of _trying_?” he asks, a bit more evilly now.

“There isn’t one,” she says. “Is there a point to antagonizing the person you love for centuries?” It’s delivered deadpan.

“Is there a point to stopping?”

How can there be, if the version of him that might have stopped for real has become but a sidekick to the Doctor? A sidekick, not important. Someone who walks by the Doctor’s side and yet not _with_ her. A sidekick, what he thought he would have become if he’d said yes that day, standing by this very ship behind them _._ A passenger on the TARDIS.

Missy laughs again.

“You already _stopped_. I don’t think this is about points any more than it is about—” She closes her eyes and smiles to herself in silence. “Hmmm, never did quite figure out what it was about.”

He observes her, withholding his judgement. However long it’s been for Missy, if all that time hasn’t helped her figure it out, they’re doomed. Then again, it’s not her fault she lost her memories in this timestream crossroads.

“Good and evil, Missy,” he says patiently. “It always is about good and evil. Which way to take? Which way leads where? Which leads to whom?”

“Well, I do know that one. Good isn’t the answer any more than evil ever was for you. She’s not standing there, waiting for you at the end of goodie-good road. Most of the time she’s only trying to find her way back on that road herself!” Missy laughs, and it’s not because it’s funny. This is the truth the Master cannot find because he still hasn’t seen what he will, one day. These are his answers. “And the only thing that’s keeping her from turning back, facing the other way, and choosing to not care, choosing to turn her back and inflict pain instead of trying to stop it? Do you not know what that is, after all this time? Stubbornness. And loving the people she loves more than she aches for the numbness of not caring again about anything or anyone..”

“People die. And when that happens, pain has already been inflicted that even _she_ can’t stop.” This is not just about the Master’s own losses. The Doctor, too, has lost things she can’t put back together. Missy knows. “Why keep trying? Why, when it keeps happening? It _will_ happen again. And I don’t mean just to me, love.” He makes profound eye contact with her. Long strands of his hair move in the wind. His words cut through it, not meaning to be hurtful, just… realistic. “You and I, we are an endless procession of pain.”

That makes her think, that last phrase—he can tell. About the noise they lost, the Doctor they found out existed in that old Hypatia system, and the version of the Master that they dared dream of and build on for so long…

Until this moment in time and space that Missy gets to live twice. But… she doesn’t agree anymore, does she? The noise did stop, the nature of their pain changed. Sometimes it ceased to be in order to become something else. When it returned, it wasn’t the same endless buzzing that had scarred their souls, their hearts, and their mind. She must remember that. And she must remember it differently.

“No,” she says, and she smiles. It’s sad, it’s warm, and it’s the only gift she can allow herself to give him now. He will forget any truth she speaks. Maybe he will remember her kindness. “I don’t think we are.”

She turns, so he’ll turn and see too, Bill and the Doctor, now laughing together after having argued, in the breeze, soft and free. At some point they notice, wave at both Masters, and come closer.

“Stop running, Master.” Missy tells him, not looking at him.

He ran once, away from the Doctor. He’s kept running. Even when stuck somewhere, he’s still running. He never did, not back on Gallifrey. He was always the one to get left behind, the one to wait, the one who waited and the one forgotten. There’s a pain unique to those who can’t stay in that place anymore and only find comfort in running from it, because there’s no home anywhere else for them.

“I can _only_ run,” he says simply. They’re not talking about literal running, of course they wouldn’t be. After traveling with the Doctor, after loving the Doctor, it’s never about real running. It’s about _avoidance._ “I’m stuck on a planet living on a ship that can’t travel in space anymore.” He sighs. “Just time. Why is it always just time?”

Missy looks at him now. Loose thin strands of her dark hair blow with the wind, as does his.

“In the end, it’ll be the only thing we’ll have left. If it won’t have us first.”

Only moments after Missy has said her piece, Bill and the Doctor approach them and the four of them quietly face the spirals of the breeze.

“Isn’t it about time you left here?” the Doctor tells him. “The world’s still out there, so changed from what you left behind you didn’t even recognize the future you’re standing in.”

“Besides, look at the state of you… You so need some sun and a hair trim,” Missy tells him.

In the Doctor’s company, Missy abandons her reckless endeavor to connect with him, her previous self, and easily reconnects with the Doctor instead by acting like she expects. The eldest game, never getting old.

“I don’t think that sun’s… in any position to tan anything anymore,” he mutters.

He remembers days in which everyone would gather around him, to try and protect him from the radiation and the deadly heat that they were genetically prepared to withstand. Now even that’s dead.

“Some time has got to be the first time, mate,” Bill says. Strained as she sounds in her attempt to be civil and gentle at once, he can appreciate their joined efforts to convince him. That, too, is part of the Doctor’s game. Her and her companions, together against something and winning. “And the company couldn’t be greater.”

The Master hums a small chuckle to himself. Another little human caught in the webs of a history too large and convoluted for her to ever grasp, putting it all in simple words for him to understand quickly and without asking questions. He should be offended by that. He should come back at her with a snarl or something worse.

Instead, he watches the truth of Bill’s statement unfurl. However long it lasts, however little. In his history, there was only one available spot for the Master in relation to the Doctor. He could either _face_ her as an opponent or fall behind her, following but never quite catching up in a cruel remembrance of what they’d been like as children. And he’d chosen enmity a long time ago as a refusal to existing in the shade. Missy’s the Master—Missy, short for Mistress, he can read it off her as well as if she’d said so herself—and yet where she stands… She came with the Doctor. And even now, after a failed betrayal that was more a misunderstanding than anything real, Missy and the Doctor gravitate around each other on equal footing to direct their attention onto a same goal. Could it really be? Can Missy really not be _following_ this time but _participating_?

“I suppose… a little walk won’t hurt anyone,” he says in the end. If he’s even aware of what he’s agreeing to do in the long run, he doesn’t even know. But more time in the group means more time watching, more time finding out about the unspoken truths Missy is holding back on.

Their combined relief at his answer sets them in motion quickly enough to get down from the cliffs. It’s clear, then. Bill walks first in line, keeping him well away from her, because his reputation precedes him. And since both the Doctor and Missy amble side-by-side right in front of him, he catches the truest glimpse so far of what’s in his future.

“Get into the TARDIS. I can handle this on my own now,” the Doctor’s whispering sweetly to her, unaware that she’s been overheard.

In different circumstances and times, the Master would have let her know of that little detail, but not now.

“Are you short of a marble? ” Missy whispers—almost hisses—back to her. “He may not have done it. But someone else has. And they’re still out there. I can help you, either to keep him in check or to… protect Bill if anything happens. Or even to question people again.” She breathes out loudly. “Besides, I’m _fine_.”

“So you’re not mad because I thought…?”

“’Course I’m mad. But I would’ve thought the same if I’d been you.” Missy glances up at her very quickly, then back down at her feet on the mud. “I think.” She sighs. “I was _very_ close to doing something stupid.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“You were terrified. I can never do anything if you’re terrified.”

“I wasn’t terrified!” The Doctor tries to downplay it.

Missy doesn’t. “You were. And it scared me into stopping.”

This time, when the Doctor’s and Missy’s eyes meet in the short distance separating them, it’s not quick and cheap.

“So maybe quit keeping emotions to yourself,” Missy whispers. “You’re risking more lives than you think, acting like Grumps back there.”

She takes a peek at the Master behind her to make it very clear Grumps is him.

“Great,” the Doctor says. “Now it’s my fault you were going to join yourself in an evil crusade?”

The Master smiles, despite himself. Some things never change. Even if his new self is no longer standing in the shade of a sun, the constant bickering has gone nowhere, and he’s glad. He doesn’t know who he’d be without years and years of silly little conversations that lead nowhere unless one looks deep into the hearts that pump oxygen into them.

And he knows now, a little bit, who he’ll be with more—so much more—than just that.

“Down there! In the water!” Bill shouts.

She runs to the edge of the slope. The rest follow, see what she’s spotted when they couldn’t. Something has breached the dark surface of the waves, calmly, poisedly, as if watching the shores from a fair distance.

“That’s a human head,” Bill says, looking up at the Doctor. “Or anthropomorphic enough. Sentient. _I don’t know_. Do they have sea monsters around here?”

All their heads turn to the Master.

“Uh… Not to my knowledge, no. There’s stories, there’s always stories. Sailors and the like getting drowned, their bodies never showing up after, but—”

Bill doesn’t need a second longer to dash down the slope.

“Where are you going?” Missy asks.

“We need to get a boat!” Bill continues running, even when facing backwards to look at them and have them still hear her voice. “Missing person by a beach. Sea monster by a beach. Coincidence? I think not!”

The Doctor and Missy exchange a confused glance.

“Kid’s got a point,” Missy says with a half-shrug.

The Doctor shrugs back at her like it’s a conversation.

“It’s much better than having to play detective again in a town where they almost burned me alive,” she replies.

“If I were you, I’d get a move on,” the Master says calmly, “because that woman can run, and if a sea creature did all the killing you’ve accused me of… she’s heading straight for it.”

“Right, yes, running. I’m good at that.”

Missy has to grab her hand and pull at her, still, to get her to. The Master runs behind them. Always behind. It calms centuries of uncertainty and rage in his hearts to see Missy run beside her. It’s an old game that maybe he lost for a long time because he only had to learn patience in order to win at it someday.

They catch up with Bill on the other side of town, already fiddling with a boat she’s managed to talk someone into loaning her. He marvels at the beauty of the local language, evolved through time, coming out of Bill’s mouth as if she’d been born to speak it. It took him too many years to so much as manage coherence in a more rudimentary branch of it.

Getting onto the boat proves to be a daunting task, since it moves on the battering sea, and it requires the combined balance of them four until everyone’s on board.

“I think it’s still there,” Bill says, squinting in the direction of the cliffs again. “What’s it even doing?”

“I don’t know,” Missy says, “but I’d suggest learning how to row, as to what _we_ are doing, if you want to get there before _it_ stops doing anything.”

She grabs one oar at the same time that the Master gets a hold of the other.

“Now, this is going to be fun…” the Doctor whispers to Bill.

Surprisingly, they coordinate rather well for two different people with one of the same brain, and by the time they get to the area where the creature was first spotted, it has not moved.

Bill is reminded of ancient legends about sirens.

Something that lives in water but can survive outside it. Camouflaged in the waves, barely visible in its translucid fleshy skin once it emerges from them. Long algae-like hair that sticks to the head and ears and gills, eyes that open like doors to truth and distances vast like universes. Nothing human in them, nothing remotely human. But there’s something so very much _alive_ that Bill knows in her species, in whatever species the Doctor and Missy share, and in that of the bark-skinned townspeople only a few hundred yards away.

Behind her, in the boat, three aliens try to stop her, but they can’t. They are too caught up in the problems of their own species, the problems of their own relationships. Bill has homed in, so she leans in, forward, her hand touches dark water, her skin feels the prickle of too many salts. And her aliens on a boat fall silent.

“Hi…” she says. “Sorry to bother you like this. But… someone recently disappeared around that beach over there.” Bill points back at the shore. “Sheir name was Elin? Everyone is looking, no one knows much, and it’s a bit of chaos all around. Do you know anything? Have you… seen anything from here?”

With eyes like those, big pools of knowledge, whoever this creature is, night vision might very well be a possibility. And didn’t Elin disappear at night?

Eyes that observe but do not give anything away, not the slightest breath of it. Bill leans in so far, Missy or the Doctor—she can’t know whose hands they are—hold desperately onto her to keep her dry and floating.

“How is Chalise?” Finally, the creature speaks.

If that physicality, proper of ancient paintings worn by history and turned myth by mankind, had been striking, hearing the chime of sea bells burst forth from a throat enraptures Bill in a desire as old as time itself. Curiosity for an ocean, what always hides in it while teasing to cease its hiding, and a final glimpse into the truth.

Yet now there is another truth. A name.

“Chalise.” Bill swallows. “How do you know Chalise?”

“Oh, stars…” the Master mutters on the boat. He sounds to Bill as if he was far away.

“I see her on that beach sometimes,” the creature says. “It almost makes me wish I could—”

“Oh, _stars,_ ” the Master hisses.

The Doctor shushes him. Missy glances at him for quite some time, as if she meant to add something privately to him.

“Are you…” Bill asks tentatively. The creature swims closer to her so they can see eye to eye. She wonders what something as extraordinary as this, as alien as this, may see in the sheer humanity of Bill herself. Something alien as well, perhaps? Or something plain that merits no attention? “Are you in love with Chalise?”

A low grumble gathers in the back of the creature’s throat. Silence falls. And the sea lulls it, sings to it in the songs only it knows, until silence decides to be broken, gently, into pieces that deserve to sail ashore, however slowly.

“No,” the creature confesses, looking down at the waves. On the boat, a collective gasp echoes louder than the wind on the sea. “I have never been. That was always the problem.”

“Oh, stars—” Missy says this time.

“—I swear to the actual constellation of Kasterborous, if either of you say that one _more_ time—”

“You’re Elin,” Bill mutters. “You’re actually shem. But… how?”

Not far away, the water is breached. There is no foam like on earth when it occurs, but the sound is as reminiscent as if there was.

“There!” the Master says.

All heads turn to the side of the boat, and a second creature of the depths of the sea emerges a good distance away from them.

“Oh—”

“ _Missy!_ ” the Doctor hisses. “Have a better standard response to stuff. Please.”

“Says the idiot who bursts out ‘oi’ every time.”

Bill’s eyes hold before her the answer. And her soul grows large within her when she realizes she was right. Judgements have failed everyone today.

“Chalise is… She’ll be fine,” Bill tells Elin. “But she loves you, and she thinks you’re dead. She needs to know. Running away won’t solve this.”

As soon as she says it, she hears it. What she’s said to someone else but won’t heed if she’s telling it to herself. Running away means she has to deal with what she leaves behind, but running away at the cost of what she leaves behind that she doesn’t want _left behind_ is not how she wants this done. And it is not how she will advise others to do it.

“How do I tell her that the life I want is somewhere else and it can’t include her how she wants?” Elin mutters. “She’d never let a sea creature drown her to transform into this. She’d never agree to become like me, just so she could have me in the ways I can allow. I’ve been leading her away from my intentions, from my call to the ocean, for so long… What would she say now?”

“It’s not just about Chalise anymore, Elin. I’m sorry,” the Doctor says, leaning forward on the edge of the boat as well, side by side with Bill. “Everyone in that town is looking for culprits because of the hole you’ve left behind and the answers you’ve deprived them of. People deserve the truth. To know it, to decide what to do with it once they’ve got it.” With the lulling of the boat, she turns a bit to her side, to look at the Master in the eye. It’s just for a moment, but it’s enough. Wordless and infinite, like they have always been. “Or people innocent to the crime the town thinks has been committed will be forced to take the blame for you.”

Those words echo in Bill’s head, clearer than Missy’s advice to follow her instincts, clearer than her own hunch to wait. _People deserve the truth. To know it, to decide what to do with it._ Those words are so much more unadulterated and honest than what the Doctor said to her about people’s resilience, because they’re not referring to people’s ability to _take_ the truth, but their need for it, their right to it.

Bill has been keeping secrets, lying. Bill has knowingly interfered with Heather’s right to know and decide.

Just like Elin, out of fear and uncertainty. And just like for Elin, time has passed. But Bill and Elin, they both have time still to mend that and come forward. Even just a little time can be time enough to speak true.

_I can tell her when I’m ready,_ Bill realizes _._

Because ‘late’ is better than ‘never’. An answer now is better than no answers.

She’s about to brave herself up to say those words to Elin—as much as she would have said them to herself—when the Doctor does, first.

“We can go look for Chalise, bring her here for you, if you want us to.” After all, just because Elin can breathe outside of the water, that doesn’t mean shey can walk. “Or we can come back tomorrow. Or the day after that. But you need to tell your family, your people, Elin. We can’t do that for you, it wouldn’t be fair.”

It’s not. So Elin agrees. And the boat returns, with only the Doctor and Chalise on it, heading for the sea where Elin and that other creature, waiting further away.

Two Masters and Bill watch from the beach.

_So this is what she does, really,_ Bill thinks to herself.

The tension is gone from the Doctor’s shoulders as she sits next to Chalise, puts a hand on her shoulder, and lets a conversation happen, watches without intervening, and mediates in energy if not in many words.

She saves people by pretending not to. She lets them think it’s all them. And maybe it is, maybe it is them. But she planted some seeds and watered them, and there is something about her that really does make people trust her enough to see those seeds grow into beautiful plants. And yet, in Bill’s chest, a wave of chills surpasses the relief in the scene unveiling before her. Because the universe now has to do without that, and the many miseries that it can boost into existence, Bill can only imagine. After all, the universe is not vast in the only one way.

They return not much after, the ends of their clothes wet and salty, and their faces long. The Doctor helps a trembling Chalise out of the boat once it hits sand.

“Bill, would you mind taking her back home?” she says. “We’ll be leaving soon, but I don’t think she should be alone right now and…”

Out of the corner of her eye, Bill sees who the Doctor is looking at, and she nods. There is still one thing to be dealt with. A hermit in a town that does not know his face yet fears him anyway because of a story without details.

“Come here…” she soothes Chalise, putting an arm around her, barely touching her. “You’ll be fine. These things happen.”

“No, they don’t. Not _here._ Not to me,” Chalise says.

All this waiting she’s done, all the not knowing, and in the end… at the end of the road the truth is what it is.

Back at the beach, they wait for quite some time after Bill and Chalise have left to speak again. The sea creatures have not hidden back into their depths and contemplate Chalise make the difficult and shameful, in a way, walk back home from a comfortable distance.

“There was a monster all along, right in front of them…,” the Master says, his tone attempting to sound humorous, “and the entire town thought it was me.”

“You’ve been a monster for a very long time,” Missy replies. “You can’t expect the memory of that to disappear just because _you_ have.”

“But I’m not,” he insists. “Not anymore.”

“What did you do?” the Doctor asks, not giving him a second after he’s spoken, not even to catch his breath. “You’re the hermit they talk about. And you traveled a long way in _time_ , not space _._ What did you do that you needed running from?”

His jaw tightens.

“I tried it your way. I did it. Years and years, there I was. Plowing fields, making it count. _Talking_ to people all over a whole galaxy.” He smiles to himself. “When I came here, I knew you’d be proud of me, if you’d survived. A self-made man. A good man, maybe.” If there had been any nuance of softness in his voice, now it dies. “Someone I—someone I cared for, lived with—They died here. They loved the sea, I mourned them by the sea, because what are you supposed to do? And let me tell you something, this bark-skinned species might be peaceful, but there are assholes everywhere. I killed one in my grief. I thought _grieving_ justified one tiny little kill. Turns out, no one found out that idiot was dead, but the rumors of the disappearance did fall on me. Just like now, wow, times don’t change, do they? Until one day the body showed up, terribly mutilated, in bits and parts, washed up by the sea. I sequestered myself to the cliffs before they could find me. And I’ve lived there ever since, skipping through time when I looked out the window and I could still _see_ my memories before me…” He rises his arms halfway through, then drops them, and smiles again, a terrible, half-smile. “You’ve caught me on my last time-skip, when no one remembers what I did anymore and yet remembers to call me a monster.”

And now he is properly stranded, trapped.

“But you’re not,” the Doctor says. “You say you’re not. Do you want to be?”

“I don’t want to pay the price for it,” he says.

“That’s… that’s not the same thing, love,” Missy says with a sad smile.

“Isn’t it?” he says, not defiantly.

“It really, really isn’t,” the Doctor says, pressing her lips in a sad thin line at him, too. She takes in a deep breath of fresh sea breeze, hands behind her back, and straightens herself as she says: “I’m going to go see how Chalise’s doing.” She puts a hand on Missy’s shoulder. “We’ll come back for you on the way back to the TARDIS later.”

“Okay…” Missy says.

She, too, prefers to stare at the ocean and imagine what awaits beneath, which secrets she might uncover if she could exist within it, around it, longer than this.

“I know now where I’m going,” the Master tells Missy, once the Doctor is out of earshot. “I’ve seen it. I accept it.” He turns to face her. “Do you?”

“I accepted it a long time ago. You remember, I accepted it when _she_ couldn’t.” Still climbing her way out of the beach, the Doctor makes for Chalise’s house on the edge of the town. Both of them cannot help but keep their eyes on her for a moment. What happened in Hypatia came and went, but who they became because of it is inescapable—for all of them. “My road is different now. Something’s coming. I don’t know who I’ll need to be. To face it.”

“Well, historically, being me never did work out in those situations.”

They both laugh at the impromptu joke.

“It really didn’t, did it?”

“Take me with you, Missy. I’ll help you. You and me, that’s better than just one of us. We can take whatever’s coming for you, eh?” He smiles, trying his very best. This is his old ways, resurfacing a tiny bit despite his promises to keep them forgotten and buried. “We can take it all down, rule over the ashes, or build sand out of broken fractals. Just don’t leave me to rot with all of it.”

She takes a gentle step back away from him.

“I’m sorry. But you have to stay here…”

He knows, of course. They both know the rules.

She won’t exist if he gets into the TARDIS. His selfishness will ruin it. And she will put up a fight.

For a moment, he does think about it. So does she. Everything can change right now. So much lost in one moment, one bit of the past ruining all of the present.

Then, he deflates. And she still cannot relax. She knows herself and what he might do in a heartbeat and the next, if his own survival is at stake. He will not even care that his future is at risk of fracturing if his present weighs heavier on him.

“How much longer?” he just asks.

How much longer does he have to spend here? In the end, that one answer is all he wants of her, and that’s the one thing she can’t give him.

The Master must remain on this planet as his own personal history dictates. Once, he chose to. Now, it is his choice again whether to betray that, push Missy’s head onto the waves, and commandeer a TARDIS. But he is choosing to stay and wait the sun out—not a hermit anymore, but Chalise from the stories. He is trusting in his future when it tells him that his sun will come out tomorrow.

The Doctor is there in that glorious tomorrow. The Master just has to find a way to recover that hope he had, in the earliest years after Hypatia, and remember how it felt, to wait for the Doctor.

Missy doesn’t have a recollection of that moment when she knew the Doctor would come back. It just… burned bright in her one day, when before there had been nothing but barren emotions and grief, old as her pain.

“How much _longer,_ Missy?” he insists. “How much more of this before it ends?”

Before the sun dies and so does he. Of grief and older tales.

“You die somewhere else,” she just tells him now. “TARDISes take some time to grow to their fullest.” Then, she echoes words he might remember from his past back to him. “But you’ve _got_ time.”

And someday, too, he’ll have purpose. She knows what the wait will cost him, but she also knows what that wait is worth.

They stay by the water during long minutes, after, in silence. It is one of those rare times when it is bearable.

Later, when the Doctor returns with Bill, the Master hugs Missy one last time, in the knowledge that it is not goodbye for them and time will catch them up. He nods to Bill. And when he is about to offer his hand to the Doctor, the Doctor smiles. She looks at Bill and Missy, her hair scattered all around her face, plastered against her eyes and eyebrows all the time, and tells them to go without her for now.

She comes to stand by his side, a few steps ahead of him, by the water. Her boots get damp in the dark waves, letting the sea lick at them. She puts her hands in her coat pockets and breathes in quietly.

“I should have asked you where you went after the Hypatia system. What you were going to do,” she says. “I think I needed to.”

He doesn’t need to elaborate on his journey towards trying to better himself. He knows she must be up to date, because of Missy.

“So why didn’t you?” he asks her, calmly, trying not to dwell on how it feels to have a future version of the person who _made him leave,_ who he accepted was expelling him, confess to being wrong.

“I’m a coward.” She smiles awkwardly, turning back to look at him as she does. “I want you to know that I didn’t ask because I wasn’t ready to … _accept_ that you’d done better than me. That you were choosing to do better than me.”

He opens his eyes a bit wider, unable to believe what he’s hearing.

“You’ll remember this,” she says. “Not all of it. But you’ll remember enough.” She takes in a deep breath, walks a bit closer to him. “I’m a coward. Always have been. And I’ve never been a good friend to you.”

“I guess that changes in the future,” he smiles, hopeful, trying to look it.

Her face hardens.

“It really doesn’t. You’ll ask the same questions over and over, and my answers never change, because sometimes even I don’t have them, but I still like to have something to say to you.”

“My, Doctor,” he says, his smile sly now. “I did always think that made you a _very_ good friend. Bit stupid, but loyal.”

“And why good?” she asks, moving her hair away from her face.

His face freezes at the question.

“Why good?” he repeats, not understanding. Then he thinks about it, grinding his jaw a bit at what he’s about to admit out loud to _her_ : “You know how much I detest _silence._ Better some recycled words than no words at all.”

“But that’s not why I do it,” the Doctor insists, hands waving in the air as she speaks. “I insist on knowledge I don’t have, knowledge I know you need, not because I know the lack of words upsets you, but because having nothing to say to you upsets _me._ ”

“And?” He doesn’t get it.

She stares at him for a long time. The wind blows between them. They can smell each other in such a short distance. History, and vengeance, and affection.

“And you said I was good,” the Doctor says. “But goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit. Without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis. ” She places her hand on his upper arm and squeezes it a little as she looks at him squarely. “Remember that.”

He then watches her waddle up the small inclination of the beach, the stones, the sand. And he smirks to himself, remembering what Missy told him.

The Doctor is the one that tries the hardest to always return to the road of goodness.

He gets it now, why Missy had told him that.

_I try, I just try,_ Missy had said.

Trying to be good is the first step towards the road.

The step the Doctor always takes.

The step the Master never had, until Hypatia, and now knows must take again. Always.

_Without hope, without witness, without reward._


	11. The joys of just tonight

Inside an otherwise perfectly good shoe rack, Bill stirs up pairs of things she could swear had never existed prior to today. Multiplying just to annoy her, the shoes and sandals and flipflops keep rising up with a solid tide of footwear when she dunks her hand back in, and it’s never what she wants to be fishing out of it.

“Are those the ones?” Heather teases her every time.

“… no.” Bill groans and puts the shoes back into the void.

Heather is already sitting on a stool by the kitchen island. Demure, legs crossed in her comfortable but very much fancy black jeans, and blinking slowly at Bill in the sly art of someone who has waited many, many times in the same position. Of course, _Heather_ herself has been ready for a while now, dressed in a nice green blouse that she only wore once to an interview for some job she didn’t get, those black jeans Bill really likes on her, and pointy heely boots that will leave a tiny bit of her ankle-to-shin area bare to the cold once they leave the house. _When_ they finally leave it.

“Since when do we have these many shoes in there?”

Heather shrugs. “I like them, you like them, they’re normally cheap…”

“No, they’re not.” Bill fumbles with an arm all stretched out to feel for her phone until she finds it somewhere on her bedroom bed. She turns on the torch app and points it straight into the depths of the shoe rack. “But, ah, outfits. Fashion! I’m really going to go barefoot to this thing if I don’t find the bloody boots. I swear…”

She catches Heather’s quick smile all the way from the kitchen.

“People only go to these things to either get very drunk or to get a little bit laid, so…” She loosens the smile until it’s a full-on smirk. “We could always stay here and improvise ourselves, save us the sight of known faces being very embarrassing.”

“If I don’t find them in… five minutes…” Bill replies, distractedly. “That’s probably going to be the plan, yeah…”

But it’s only a matter of seconds before she pulls out of the profound obscurities of her shared shoe rack the exact pair of extravagantly big platform boots she’s been looking for.

“Hah! Got them!”

Even in a tight skirt, Bill pays no mind to sitting on the bedroom floor to lace up her boots.

“Hey,” Heather asks. “You think they’ll be there?”

“Who?”

“Rainbow Star and Professor Witch?” Heather says. It’s so obvious she’s hardly biting down on a giggle.

It takes Bill a second or two to figure out who those nicknames refer to.

“People still call them that?” she says.

Although, if she’s being perfectly honest, the Doctor and Missy do serve those looks almost every single day in class. It would be very hard for them to ever lose the nicknames without also losing the clothes.

Heather shrugs.

“It’s better than Mr. Fuckdonald, that professor of mine who cursed in class once when he stubbed his toe and was never forgiven for it.”

“People are so cruel,” Bill says, getting up from the floor and getting her jacket and bag from her bed.

Heather stands up from the stool as well to meet her halfway. Bill wastes a wonderful second of her life simply… breathing it in, the way Heather moves towards her, looking like that, after forever of just work, food, and sleep, seeing each other less than Heather even realizes because Bill is hardly ever home.

She’s hardly ever been in the _time_ she should be, after the Doctor agreed to one trip and then one more and then one more ad infinitum. And Bill’s been making time, killing time, putting time itself off, waiting this out.

“What?” Heather laughs the word out of her mouth, softly, afraid it’ll flinch its way back in once it’s left it.

Bill’s hand reaches for her cheek. She’s put some makeup on, and yet all she feels underneath the tip of her finger is _Heather_. She promised to herself she’d do this, and she doesn’t want to do it at the party, where it’ll be loud and they’ll probably drink some sobriety away.

“Nothing, it’s just…” she says. “You know all these late shifts I’ve been having lately?”

“Oh, that. I really don’t mind, Bill. You’ll be home more when you can.”

Heather grins at her. If only she hadn’t, then perhaps Bill would have used that, and whatever feeling might have stemmed from the small confrontation of emotions inside, and told her. But neither of them have ever let any negativity about late night shifts or lack of schedule coordination affect them that much.

_So maybe it’ll just have to be some other time,_ Bill thinks to herself. She _will_ be more at home when she can. That, too, is a promise. A promise that Heather knows exists, without her having even heard yet.

Bill sighs when Heather’s hand covers her own.

“D’you think if we’re a little late to the party anyone will notice?” she mutters.

“Bill,” Heather says, trying to sound serious, “we’re always _a little late_ everywhere.”

They both burst into laughter.

* * *

In the final touches, Missy’s breath catches.

First, it caught as she did buttons on a shirt so pristine she would have never guessed it had been kept and forgotten in a closet for centuries. Then, she had to swallow repeatedly to remind herself that she _could_ and _should_ breathe normally, when she spread the jacket’s sleeves and guided the Doctor’s arms into each. Now, Missy’s fingers are moving so very close to her neck, managing to make magic out of a bowtie, and she doesn’t quite know anymore if Time Lords even need oxygen.

“I wore one of those for that entire life when you and I didn’t see each other,” the Doctor comments casually

Missy giggles to herself at the image.

When Missy finishes with the bowtie, her hands rest for a moment still on the Doctor’s clavicles, then slide down onto her upper sternum and pat it once.

“You have really fast fingers.”

“I know. And that’s in spite of you not staying still for one single minute of this.”

With one final pat, and a small correction to the shirt’s collar, Missy moves away to contemplate what she has helped create. Despite her initial intention to chastise the Doctor for moving too much, her grin has already betrayed her.

Eventually, she lets her hands return to the Doctor’s clavicles. And she lets herself pretend they’re there to adjust the bowtie.

“A bowtie…” Missy shakes her head. “I would have recognized you in three seconds flat. With your hands all wavy, and your hair, and your flair.”

“And my _tweed_ jacket.”

“My stars, you must have been a fashion emergency walking.”

With every bit of the bowtie business concluded, Missy leans to the side to hold the red scarf, the finishing touch, and puts it around the Doctor’s neck and shoulders.

“See? My fashion’s never been good, you’re not even ready yet, and—” The Doctor wrinkles her nose. “Did we get Arthur into your TARDIS permanently or something? All his toys are in your TARDIS, for some reason, but there’s still cat hair everywhere around here.” She sniffs at the red fabric of the scarf. “It’s very weird.”

“Yeah, he’s in mine.” Missy says, amused at the sudden cat mention. “I locked him in for the night. He won’t miss us, he’s got food.”

“Do we have to go?” The Doctor sways a little on the spot like a little child caught red-handed and waist-deep in mud while dressed in white clothing. “It’s just that it’s one of those things institutions do for the kids to mingle… This is probably the only school in this hemisphere that also invites _professors_.”

It has been a couple of weeks—Earth time—since their first adventure with Bill, and although the Doctor’s doing better after having traveled with company and, generally, again, she’s still struggling to socialize like she used to.

“It’s gonna be Halloween soon anyway,” she continues. “Couldn’t they have postponed it till then? Made it a theme party?”

“Yes, but then it would have been _Halloween_ , not Meet & Greet”

“I don’t wanna go…” The Doctor scrunches her entire face into an adorable expression of pure disinclination.

“The human littluns are going. They need adults around to keep an eye on them, make sure nobody accidentally dies from… well, spontaneous combustion.”

“I’m not an adult yet.” As if clarification was needed, she whips up the ends of her scarf, dramatically, like they’re thin flat balloons. “Too young to have to look after humans for a whole night without anything else to do…”

Missy blinks, unfazed.

“That’s been… basically your job for years.”

“But it’s not the same, we had stuff going on.”

“Parties usually involve stuff. You do dance, don’t you?”

Too many flashbacks of too many people asking that, or asking to see the results of the answer to that. But, above all, memories of times when Missy _didn’t_ ask her, just snatched her from whatever cubicle she’d built herself in a barn, in a classroom, and took her to the most beautiful sites just to listen to the music of the stars. Maybe, if she’s remembering correctly, she might have then danced to it. Once or twice. When you have a friend like Missy, poised student, bit of a rebel within but only daring to show it when it’s dark outside, you pluck whatever hidden skill you have in your geeky, astronomically bouncy soul in order to see the side of her that matches the whole of you.

The Doctor rolls her eyes, because it has been a long time, and now the only thing she dances away is the feeling of ridicule humans have.

“ _Ob_ viously.”

Missy smiles coyly at her now.

“So then see you in the danceroom… partner.”

She waves at the Doctor so she’ll leave the TARDIS and go downstairs, wait for her there, in the areas designated for activities the night only heightens. Missy herself disappears into the corridors, looking for her yellow room and what she neatly hid in it, waiting for a special day, since the day they met Bill.

“Where’re you going? You dress me up all fancy and I don’t even get to choose your shoes with ya?”

“All been chosen. You just have to wait and see.”

The Doctor obeys and leaves the TARDIS. She closes the door behind her, but remains by the blue surface of its wood. A second later, in the echo, the hum, and the heartbeat of four, Missy can still hear her say:

“Never been very good at patience!”

* * *

Somewhere in the main building, as it must be customary for most schools, there turns out to be a theater room, larger than the auditorium where she and Missy hold their astronomy lessons. Today, it has been cleared of every seat and other assorted pieces of furniture, and instead equipped with ballroom lights, tables and chairs for people to be able to sit down and converse, a DJ booth on the stage, and a few longer tables at either sides of the ample room, catered with food and drinks.

The Doctor’s drinking some terrible beverage and enjoying its terrible qualities, taste and color regardless, waiting for the theater room to fill with more students and professors, when a tap on her shoulder startles her into gulping down the last sip she’d taken.

It’s Missy. Yet not _just_ Missy.

Missy, but in a long-sleeved dark blue dress, shaped like a suit jacket that reaches up to her mid-thighs and shows cleavage even though she’s wearing a satin, clearer blue waistcoat underneath that prevents her from showing stomach as well, since the jacket dips nicely into her upper stomach.

She’s put on one of her oversized leather jackets as well, unzipped, to keep from being cold, and a bit of a blue piece the same color as the waistcoat and same material twice around her neck tied in a loose knot, resting on her clavicles.

Her hair, down and messy, adheres very much to the witch-hair look she puts effort into, but only slightly so in order to fit into party standards. And she exudes that fierceness so characteristic to hers, from her hair to her simple flat black boots, loose-fitting and a bit higher up her ankle at the front than at the back.

It’s Missy, but to an exponent that the Doctor’s very analytical and mathematical side cannot even approach now. Especially when Missy blinks at her with eyes like hers, in make-up that is barely just eyeliner and a bit of eyeshadow, dark and minimalistic, and yet electrifying.

“Hi,” the Doctor can only say, her pitch raised a little bit, and her eyes open wide to absorb every bit of what she’s seeing before it drifts away from the light.

“Hi,” Missy says, flirtily, and very much enjoying the moment of pause and awe her friend has just had, which is why she arranged to do it in the first place.

One thing the Doctor _does_ have, and that’s aesthetic attraction and a terrible inability to process information the moment she receives it. Missy shouldn’t like to play with that as much as she does.

Around them, people are dancing to some song that has lyrics much too unusual and poignant for a song to just dance along to. But the rhythm’s good, and one can listen and move at the same time, after all.

“What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” Missy asks.

The Doctor, idiot extraordinaire, practically shoves her own little cup (whatever it is, facts are that it has a very unflattering hue in whatever light color shines down on it) onto Missy’s chest.

“Sharing, then? Neat,” Missy says. She takes a sip and performs a bit of a twirl to watch the room. Her hair falls prettily on her shoulders, leaving a trail of shampoo scent behind her that the Doctor smiles at when it reaches her. “How’re the kids behaving?”

“The usual. You know, someone started doing that thing?”

Missy asks without asking, making that ‘eyes closed, tense smile, judging demeanor’ face of someone who is not expecting anything normal out of the answer.

“That thing. Where they just… lower their butts parallel to the floor and in tune with the music but still keep them up in the air a bit? Very strange. Then more people followed.”

“You mean… that?” Missy points at a group in the middle of the room.

The Doctor wrinkles her nose.

“What even is it?” she says. “A mating call or something?”

“Little bit, yeah. But only when it _is_ intended to be. The rest of the time it’s just…” Missy keeps staring at the students having fun and trying not to laugh at how the Doctor sees the world. “Humans doing human things because they’re happy. I don’t think it really means anything.”

“When do humans _not_ do human things?”

_When they become creatures on par with the most terrible races in the universe,_ Missy thinks. _And call it evolution. Or following orders. That’s not human, that’s… older than their species. And way harder to get rid of._

She should know. How many times has she tried to destroy Earth, home to the future vermin of space and the Doctor’s favorite pets? Goodness dies defending itself, and evil rises with all its power and survives by fighting dirty.

Missy shakes her head and banishes those thoughts, persistent even if she’s not dreaming them in the inescapable corners of the night. That is not how she thinks now. That is not how she chooses to work. The cruelty of history never prevails, _because_ good people riot and fight unfair orders and build better societies against any powers evil might wield. Here, and everywhere else in the universe. The Doctor’s said that often enough, and Missy, with her, lately and ever, has _seen_ it for herself.

_Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit._

“Hey!” a voice, loud and clear like a bell, retrieves Missy’s find from her own mental gutter. Bill emerges from the many shivering lights in the ambiance with another girl her same age, and they’re both smiling grandly. “Guys, this is Heather.” Bill’s face immediately fills up with its own source of light at the mention of the name. “And these are—”

Heather visibly tries not to laugh.

“Rainbow Star and Professor Witch.”

Missy rolls her eyes just as visibly.

“Oh, for the love of—drop the ‘professor’ at least. Commit to it! The Witch. Isn’t that much more refined?”

The Doctor stifles a snort by her side.

“What?” Missy says.

“Nothing.” She definitely snorts now. “ _The_ Witch… Stole the ‘the’ from somewhere, have we?”

Missy _almost_ retorts with a sharp and pouty, ‘who came first, _the_ Doctor or _the_ Master, you ridiculous blob of names, one of which is an _angle,_ by the way?’ but she’d rather tease her with that later, and preferably not in front of company.

“ _And—_ ” Bill continues. “These are The Doctor and Missy.”

“Never seen you around the school before, Heather. Very nice to meet you.” The Doctor shakes Heather’s hand enthusiastically with a hint of a poorly disguised wink. “Bill speaks _a lot_ about you.”

Bill’s jaw drops.

“Wha—not so much as _a lot,_ I wouldn’t say. A little. A very normal amount for a girlfriend, more like, yeah?” She almost mutters the last part through her teeth.

Heather giggles, loud in the music. It’s not uncomfortably thundering through the loudspeakers so that they have to shout to each other to make their words understood, but she still must be laughing hard now if they can hear that, too.

“You’re rocking those outfits, by the way,” Bill says, munching down on some snacks she brought along from the food table. “Classic.”

“Ooooh, likewise.” Missy surveys Bill’s black-and-white patterned skirt, her black top, and some cardigan with very long flaps that reach up to her knees, and nods appreciatively. Even Heather’s more casual get-up passes her criteria for well-dressed. “You youngsters having fun so far?

Both of them make a non-committal noise, accompanied by an emotionally appropriate face.

“Music’s good so far,” Bill says. “But… eh.”

Heather smiles a half-smile, judging Bill.

“Come on, it’s not so bad…”

“You were the one that didn’t wanna come.”

“I did, things just came up,” Heather reminds her. “And now that we’re here… We could dance.”

Missy laughs and throws her hands up for emphasis.

“I said the same thing!”

“We could _eat_ ,” Bill and the Doctor say at the same time, pointing at each other in happy unison once they notice the coincidence. The Doctor’s red scarf tangles slightly in her arms as she does.

The group then heads to one of the little food tables and they end up spending some time there, until the music begins to shift a little from upbeat break-up songs one can very much dance to into more mainstream music everyone more or less recognizes.

Between food and some drinks, the conversation becomes a mix of class recollections and stories about how Bill and Heather met, which the Doctor and Missy hadn’t really heard yet. Not even that one time that the TARDIS decided she didn’t want to take off and stranded them for five full alien days someplace where the air smelled like ham and could actually be chemically solidified into edible food. The Doctor did, in fact, solidify a few square feet of it and _ate_ them _._

After a few minutes of watching the rest of the room gather in various groups and mingle, the Doctor puts her glass of unidentified beverage down on the table, sets her bowtie right and clears her throat, adjusting her scarf so that both ends dangle free from her neck, without tying around it.

“How about some good old chaperoning?” she announces to Missy.

“Don’t chaperone us,” Bill says at once.

“Not you,” Missy clarifies. “And it’s not _chaperoning._ I think it’s called mingling now?” She clings to the Doctor’s arm. “You’re good at making friends. Ooooooh! We can go make friends.”

“Don’t talk to Mr. O’Donnell,” Heather says, gulping down the last of her drink.

“Most boring dude there is. I stopped going to his classes last year because he made me sleepier than I already was,” Bill points out. “Then I got him this year again and he’s gotten even _duller_ , but what can you do about it? I actually do need my notes for his class now, Heather’s not there this time.”

They look at each other with longing and sweetness. Missy has to look away before she rolls her eyes again.

Human affection is so… sticky in the chest of the beholder, with all those elongated feelings and those highs and lows. She’s been burning warm with old love for centuries, she can’t possibly understand the _fleetingness_ of it, no matter how hard she tries. Human love, in all its forms, is like a song. Most beautiful because in a way it is an art to be made, ecstatic and operatic even as it dies with a fading sigh or the greatest bang of cannons, and bound to function in tune to its own ephemerous nature. Time Lords love and hate for so long it is no wonder some succumb and become what they feel.

_And what am I?_ Missy wonders. So many centuries spent loving and hating, both stemming from the very same spot in her hearts… She could be either. She feels like none. She dreams of only one.

“So d’you want to, then?” the Doctor asks her. “As I recall, I’m not the only one notoriously known for befriending almost everyone I come in contact with.”

Missy scoffs good-naturedly.

“I doubt the word people historically tended to use in relation to me was ‘befriending’, but okay.”

Offering Missy her arm to take, the Doctor turns to Bill and Heather.

“See you later?”

The both of them nod, smiling, and watch the two most-gossiped-about professors in the entirety of St. Luke’s almost glide away on the polished floors that tonight practically gleam under the changing lights above.

“They’re so weird,” Heather says. “I love them. I’m really gonna have to skip class one day and sneak into Astronomy with you.”

“They’re _really_ weird,” Bill agrees. “And I think it’s a little impossible to not love them.”

They lean on one of the walls, a fair distance away from people, mostly first-years (who the party is for, in all honesty, since they’re the ones who don’t know each other or the way around the place very well yet). Everyone else just came for the party, the food, and the music.

Hidden from the crowds, they watch people change their patterns, as their groups separate, as the music changes. Now, it’s softer. Now, pairs of people begin to slow-dance to songs that make the large room so much quieter, so much better for talking normally.

“D’you remember when you came here and you were that tiny?” Heather asks Bill.

Bill nudges her gently with her elbow.

“They’re not _tiny._ Just… younger.” She supports her head back on the wall. “I don’t even think I knew what I was doing at eighteen. I mean, do I even know now at twenty-two?, ’cause I don’t think so.”

Heather laughs. Her head comes to rest on Bill’s shoulder.

“I don’t think anyone really does. I certainly never did.”

“Yeah, but… you have your plans,” Bill says, turning her face a little to face Heather. “You know. Job, house. Your degree. A better job that’s not waitressing.”

“It’s not that bad in itself. It’s people being creepy and gross and rude that make it shitty,” Heather says.

“That makes it creepy and gross and rude, Heather.”

They chuckle weakly, because the alternative is hardly ever laughing at the misery of it.

“And after the better job, the better house?” Heather asks Bill.

“I don’t know, it’s your plan. Mine’s day by day. Classes, job, Heather. Lots of Heather. TV, nice food, maybe a book. I miss reading… And down the line, who knows? Anything can happen, can’t it? Maybe we’ll win the lottery.” She sighs. “Anything can happen…”

Heather’s head immediately shoots up from Bill’s shoulder.

On the loudspeakers, all around them.

_Tale as old as time…_

“No way…” Heather says, laughing. She holds Bill’s hand and nods at the dance floor, a little more crowded than before. “Come on, Bill Potts. Dance with me, it’s meant to be. It’s your ‘anything can happen’ song now.”

Bill’s face melts into a tiny little grin when she realizes the serendipity and the truth in what Heather just said. It is, in fact, their ‘anything can happen’ song.

She more than at any other time in her life now believes in that. Because it can. Because it has.

Because when she puts her arms around Heather’s waist, because when she looks at her, she sees _every_ thing that ever happened and ever will much more clearly than a time vortex could in a million lifetimes convey to her. Because this little corner of existence in a little world with little people who think so highly of themselves and never own up to their terrible mistakes, is the little corner where she and Heather exist, together. It’s a big enough corner for her.

And the song cannot last long enough.

“You really didn’t ask for it? Telepathically or something?” Bill asks her, after it’s over.

Heather frowns.

“Telepathically?” But she laughs, too.

“I don’t know. The coincidence?”

“Someone else must have,” Heather says, turning her head a little to try and find whoever she thinks it could be. “A fan of the movie or something.”

“Bless the nerds,” Bill says.

“Bill, _you_ have _posters_ of I don’t even know anymore which web series it is now.”

Bill sticks her tongue out and just holds Heather closer. They keep dancing even past the few seconds when there is no song, nothing but the noise of people existing in the limbo of the party, and even when the next song begins and it is something timeless that Bill doesn’t recognize or like very much, she and Heather don’t let go. They’re not even dancing anymore; the endless unspoken language of their eyes looking into each other is music, and dancing is enough.

Not very far away, another pair of different bickering rules braves the dancefloor.

_Don't close your eyes, dear, don't you be nervous  
You put this whole damn place in a spell_

“Wow, the musical variety is truly astounding tonight…” Missy says for the brief few seconds in which the song’s still commencing, not quite delving into its own depths. Into the one word that has shaped the lives of her and the beautiful Time Lord that’s agreed to slow-dance with her tonight.

Missy leads once it picks up, but does she really? Has she, ever? Could she so much as pretend to, with the Doctor there? With the Doctor’s changing eyes, the color of which Missy has never been able to pinpoint in many lives? Just because Missy’s left hand drives them in one direction, two swans making perfect waves in the water, that doesn’t mean the Doctor’s own left hand on Missy’s shoulder is not _creating_ any perfect anything.

Hands. The language of them. Words. The subtlety of what they don’t say. Who even decided what subtext was?

_I saw your mother, she looked so beautiful  
Remember when she didn't think I would stay?_

“I think it’s nice. That way everyone gets at least one song that it’s a little similar to what they like.”

Missy actually smiles at how kind that is to say and to hope for. That everyone in this room, even if she doesn’t know or care much about them, gets a brief glimpse of something pleasant tonight.

“You won’t unless they give you some rock music. And I’d be surprised if they did, having well transitioned into this….”

“I don’t just like rock, mind you.” The Doctor looks Missy in the eye. “I’m perfectly capable of enjoying this, too. My tastes are quite varied.”

“Are they, now?”

_I'm feeling time move slow_

_I'm seeing faces glow_

_None of them shine as bright_

_As you tonight_

Missy puts her to the test. In the silence between stanzas, she raises both their joined hands, gesturing for the Doctor to twirl in her arms. She does, slowly, almost reluctantly, and comes to rest, her back against Missy’s chest, for a moment, before Missy encircles her and they sway again with the music.

_I’m hearing voices hush_

_There’s no one else but us_

“This is nothing like the dancing we did when we were young,” Missy warns her.

“Who complained about it being any different?” the Doctor says. “I am very good with change. Historically.”

_Darling, there’s so much love_

_Under these lights_

“I don’t know,” Missy admits. “I figured you’d be uncomfortable. Those two left feet of yours, plus an old pal being… Well, a little bit taken with her own old pal, and a little closer than normal.”

The Doctor turns again, to face her, to hold Missy’s waist in her tiny hands and meet her eyes without a single thing in between, not even the lights. The entire planet Earth couldn’t get between them now.

“Missy,” she says with a shy and yet reassuring smile. “You can have this.”

Their middle ground, empty of what Missy seeks elsewhere, overflowing with what Missy only seeks in the Doctor, now could expand into what exists in between. What Missy knows both might seek but never dare actually reach out for, least of all in each other. Because they’re not a couple, and will never be, but they’re not just friends either. And where does dancing like this, in such proximity, fit in all of the diagrams? Where does feeling like Missy feels for her fit?

When they’re not enemies, they’re not lovers, they’re not friends. They’re _more._ And family can’t possibly ever convey it well either, even if deep down that’s what they are. By choice if not by blood.

“You can have it,” the Doctor repeats, softer this time. “Tonight and… All of the time, in fact. If anyone is ever going to have it—if I were ever to want to have it with anyone, it’d be with you.” She frowns and pouts a little bit. “And I don’t have _two left feet._ I _am_ dancing. I haven’t stomped on you yet.”

_If it's okay, let's just have the time_

_Let's just have the time_

_Of our lives_

“I don’t want _this_ —” Missy looks up and down at the two of them, living in the last seconds of the song, and realizes that middle grounds might exist to grow larger, but they are not created to be fully explored. This one, she knows exactly where she will set the limits of, even in its hypothetical infinity. “—all of the time, you silly thing. It’s nice to get a glimpse, for one night, into what it could be and know that you’d be _stunning_ in that role, but I don’t want you playing a role for me.” She laughs and tugs softly at the ends of the Doctor’s red scarf. “You’ve always been a pretty shitty friend, but hey, still the best I’ll ever have. Wouldn’t want anyone else being my friend for life.”

“We’ve always been _something_ for life, haven’t we?” the Doctor says. Even as the song ends in final silence, and people fill the room with their human sounds and cheers—now a bit drunker, happy that life goes on in the worry-less, loud moments of unadulterated ecstasy—they keep on dancing to no music but that of their memories and hearts. “Friends. Enemies. Whatever we are now that’s not lovers and that’s… a bit grander than just friends?”

In a motion slow and practiced that Missy knows is so performative, the Doctor gets her sonic out of a pocket to point it at the DJ booth, and _La Vie En Rose_ starts playing at the same time that her eternal grin becomes a full beam, sunnier than all of the stars in the universe combined.

“Oh, Doctor…” Missy laughs in her arms this time, bending backwards a bit, her hair falling in a cascade of perfect, beautiful darkness. “Now, after all that speech of yours, I believe this is allowed?”

The Doctor holds her still and is there for Missy to stare into her eyes when she rises back up.

“It’s you and me, sweetheart,” the Doctor says to her. “Until the end of time.”

Missy beams back at her.

“Even then,” she replies softly. “Even after.”

They remain in an embrace for the ages, oblivious to everything else, well after the echo of Louis Armstrong’s voice has faded from each and every one of their hearts.

Life is no bed of roses, not for one second of it, but sometimes, occasionally, if a Time Lord gets lucky, they get to experience something intense and short-lived, yet still not hard on the hearts, that reminds them of the joys of living. Sometimes, a Time Lord gets a beautiful song where and how they shouldn’t. And they dance along.

“Sorry about that, folks,” the DJ apologizes. “Little technical mishap here.”

“Yeah, I might go over there this time and actually ask for a song,” the Doctor says with a dashing grin. “Like a person.”

“If you’re doing person stuff, don’t ask for the Gymnopédies next,” Missy says. They let go of each other now, and as the Doctor makes for the stage, she shouts: “Can’t bop to that!”

Missy’s eyes linger on her. Her hearts beat in her chest, an ode to history and the joys tonight has brought. The Doctor has not acted different, not in changing lights, not in a room full of drinks and people having drunk them. She’s still waddling places slowly, aware that she was once bigger than any of them and more dangerous to any of them than anything humanity ever feared. Aware and having moved on from that a long time ago. She’s still the same Doctor that dances, and lands in the wrong planet and time, the same Doctor that changes face but never hearts. Parties and feelings don’t faze her. And Missy watches her, fazed by them both, in the knowledge that whatever song plays next, it’s not about the music for her. It’s maybe never been about the music for either of them.

When the Doctor turns back to her, she’s conveying the slyness of a thousand smirks only with her eyes. Then, rock thunders in Missy’s chest. In the entire theater, and yet somehow _only_ , mostly, in her hearts.

“Can definitely bop to _this_ ,” she yells across the loudness.

Not very far away, in the changing light of the theater emptied of its theaterness, a light flickers in the air when nothing should have, and two people step out of it as if space and time had ripped apart, then open, and then… just closed.

Because of the disco ambiance of tonight, nobody even notices, not even those closest to the incident. The two people, a woman with very curly hair between blond and light brown who touches a sort of leathery keypad on her left wrist, and a tall broad man in a military coat, are not dressed for the occasion and yet don’t stand out in the slightest.

“If we keep beaming ourselves down to—” The woman inhales deeply as if to check that way what time and place it is they’ve traveled to. “—21st-century Earth, what we’re going to find ourselves is a Doctor past his many expiration dates, not the bloody gang.”

The man smiles slyly.

“And what did I tell you?” he says. “Even aliens hiding on 21st-century Earth let their guard down eventually. It’s here. I can smell it…”

Slowly, they begin to make their way through the dancing pairs of students and a few loose professors, past the crowds of friends.

“You know, for a man born a hundred years before I was…” the woman teases, and by her tone, it is obvious she’s holding back from being sharper in her words and general implication. “You certainty boast of behaviors the human species won’t have for quite a while.”

As if they weren’t in a hurry, the man stops on his way to stare into her eyes and calmly say, frowning.

“It’s a manner of _speaking_ …”

In a height that almost matches his own, she doesn’t hesitate to lean in until she’s breached his personal space.

“And who taught you manners?” she says, almost mocking him, softly. “Didn’t you ever go to school?”

“I’ve gone to _space_ school,” he replies arrogantly. Then, he invades whatever distance she’d left unbreached between them. “What have you done, studied fossils on a moon?”

“That’s paleontology for you. I don’t _do_ paleontology… No fossils left in our centuries.” The woman smirks. “You’d know that if you’d spent any time in your year instead of running cons all over time and space.”

“Nice to know!” The man finally pulls back from her and curtsies, waving at the sort of open pathway set before them. “Can we focus now? In our midst, in this very moment, there’s an alien with the key to fixing my problem.”

“ _Our_ problems.”

“Yes. Our problems,” he concedes, rolling his eyes. Almost at once, wordless having agreed to continuing their silent search, they go on walking around the theater. “So, any plans on finding this thing? Every human here is so human-looking today.”

“Yes,” she says, not laughing at his attempt of a joke. “But who’s the most human of them all?” Opening her eyes wide, the woman adds: “Who’s the most human of them all _and_ is deliberately trying not to _be seen_ by us?”

The man lets out a chuckle and pats her shoulder.

“You know, it’s at times like this that I’d really ask you to come work with us, when this is over.”

She graces him with a brief, sweet grin that neither of them fully believes or trusts, yet both appreciate.

“I told you you’d warm up to me,” she nags at him.

For a while, this is all they do, sweep the area in a thread of thin silence that gets interrupted by short comments and physical endeavors at casual touch from time to time. They never take the latter anywhere, because she’s committed to someone else who the stories says she’ll marry one day and he’s got a boyfriend back home that he never calls that but that she _knows_ must be something of the sort, or else he would have already pulled his typical final flirting stunt with her.

“I’ve got her,” the woman warns him when he’s halfway through some anecdote about a feat of his in the golden days with a spaceship, a bomb in the middle of a city, and too many hot people, not all of them human. “Quickly. She can’t do anything now, in front of everyone here tonight. I doubt she even has the equipment around. You were right.”

“Often am.”

They head there in quick strides. As they do, they happen to run past someone that the woman doesn’t recognize, although she should have, and they do so while saying what, in the end, makes that very someone _recognize_ them.

“She’s not running away,” a woman says.

The Doctor’s ears prickle at the sound of that familiar voice in this kaleidoscope of noise. Missy and her, they’re acting like teenagers, forgetting to care and just letting the laughter come and burst out of them like lava out of volcanos. But when the Doctor hears this, something in her bottles up and ceases to be. Something else takes over.

Old selves, resurfacing instead.

So many old selves.

“Where would a runaway alien from a pirate gang _run away_ now? It’s surrounded by humans who don’t know. And it can’t teleport anywhere. It’s trapped. With us here, hiding is its best hope. We’re so close.”

That voice, too… When was the last time she heard it? When was the last time she spoke the name that bears it?

“Harkness, this is so it. Do you realize what it means?”

“Oh, yes, baby. Cardiff stops spitting out time events like they’re arcade tickets. And you… go away. To dig up stuff. Very useful, when these babies exist.”

Vortex manipulators?

“Our little friend in common would so laugh at you for that.” The woman says to him, laughing. They must be near, then. Near and not moving. “Cheap and nasty time travel.”

Vortex manipulators.

“Cheap? Yes. Nasty? Yes. But he forgets they’re easier to come by than time machines.” He laughs for a moment, then interrupts himself with an exaggerated groan. “The goddamn alien is not even trying to casually walk away. Today’s our lucky day, Song. We’re finally getting it back.”

Captain Jack Harkness and Doctor River Song. On Earth. Right here. In this very room.

The Doctor’s very lucky she doesn’t just plain old forget how to navigate life in a body and become jelly. By the time she remembers how knees and feet work connected to her brain, Missy’s probably laughing at her or at least making sounds that she is not registering, and the pair of her old friends have moved away. She has to try and track the path they’re following.

They were talking about aliens. Aliens means mysteries and adventures, on home territory, just like Bill said might happen again because according to her, Bristol’s a bit of hotspot. A surge of excitement erupts in her, and she’s about to run to Bill, grabbing Missy along with her, when memories assail her.

River and Jack, they weren’t _just_ talking about aliens.

They said they were getting something back.

Just like—

_—we will get it back_ —

—the message in the warehouse.

It never is just adventure and mystery. Not with a runaway time agent turned Torchwood leader and an assassin turned professor/doctor of archaeology all teamed up and very decidedly walking towards—

“Oh, no, you don’t,” the Doctor says.

“What?” Missy says.

The breath leaving her is all hushed and heavy because of the physical exertions of the night, and are cheeks are flushed with the joys of tonight. She hasn’t seen or heard. She probably doesn’t remember the captain that once participated in thwarting one of her plans and the woman who did marry the Doctor. Or will marry, depending on whose timeline is telling the story, the bride’s or the groom’s.

“Doctor,” Missy insists. Her eyes try to find the source of what’s having the Doctor part her way through people like she’s trying to escape something or fly to something precious. “What’s going on?”

Then, when she’s followed her far enough away from the dancefloor, Missy realizes the Doctor is indeed flying to something. To someone. Years of espionage and lies and hiding have taught her to spot the infiltrators. And those two, do not look dressed to impress, do not look like they came here to dance away their sorrows or flirt their way into the morning, but they are definitely heading, with the decision of two murderers ready to strike, for Bill and Heather.

The Doctor bids her time, shushing Missy to keep quiet as they watch the scene unfold.

“Hey, Bill, I think Penny’s calling you” Heather says, her voice strangely withdrawn, when she sees who’s coming for her and realizes there will be no way out, not in these circumstances.

“Penny? Can’t see her…” Bill squints at the opposite side of the room.

Heather has no time to reply to that.

“No one’s going anywhere,” River says. “Sorry, girls. You have something that belongs to Torchwood Cardiff. We’d like it back, before a fuss needs to be made.”

“What’s going on?” Bill asks. Her eyes stray from one newcomer to the other, then finally lock on Jack’s, since he’s the one that’s stepped closer, even though he’s not the one that spoke first. “We’re just chilling here, and have been all night. No one’s stolen anything. This is a _school_.” She pauses, frowning. The Doctor has been in enough mystery trips with her to recognize the sign of Bill’s first suspicion, forming. “Plus, you don’t look like police to me…”

“Oh, I don’t think anyone here is what they seem to be, are they?” Jack says, loudly. “Your friend—” He points at Heather, “—is part of a… let’s say consortium that has stolen something from my organization. And trust me, I’ve had a few problems already because of it.” He addresses Heather’s glaring expression now. “So talk now, you can go free. Don’t talk? You’ll get the privilege of a cell next to a hungry, starved weevil. Heard about them? They’re quite strong. Enough to smash their way into the cell next door, perhaps.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” the Doctor finally interrupts. She’s heard what she needed to.

Bill’s breathing eases the second that she sees her emerge and push her way from behind the two people she doesn’t know.

“Hi, River—”

“Hello, sweetie.”

“—Captain… Lovely to see you both, as always. But would anyone care to elaborate a little on the ‘Heather is a thief’ accusation that has been thrown at her so lightly?”

“And what was that about something stolen?” Missy adds.

Just as soon as Missy opens her mouth, and regardless of what she says, Jack’s entire face transforms from that of a man who means serious business to that of the goof who the Doctor more than once had to almost unglue from the nearest non-terrestrial person in order to continue their journey.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” he says. “And who might you be?”

Missy holds his gaze and, thankfully, doesn’t lose composure.

“I’m the Master,” she reveals to him slowly, fluttering her eyelashes at him. She modulates her voice so that it echoes so very sweetly in the air. “Hi. Been a while, has it?”

The Doctor doesn’t think she has ever seen Jack Harkness pull away from a flirting attempt. Until now. And probably not because he doesn’t find Missy attractive in the many ways _he_ can find people attractive. To make up for it, _River Song,_ of all people, picks up where he left off.

“The famous Master,” she says—almost purrs. “I’ve heard _so much_ about you, giving my poor Doctor hell for eternity.”

“So have I. The woman who marries her. Not everyone can do that…” Missy mutters—almost purrs—back.

“Merely an administrative measure, the stories say,” River says. “But, if history’s right, it will stick regardless.”

“Spoilers!” the Doctor says, blushing all the way to kingdom come. “I’ve been married to a lot of people, the act in itself… Not very keen on that, not very special to me. The people I ‘marry’? Very much so, if not for the reasons they usually expect.” She turns to Missy and mouths: “Really? River? _You_ and River?” Then, she shrugs nonchalantly.

Both River and Missy cease their impromptu flirting in order to address some of that energy, now combined, to the Doctor. The triangular existence of now more than Missy’s beloved middle ground and River’s promise of a marriage fills spaces that neither were sure could even be mathematically comprehended.

“Hello?” Bill says. “Can you not do… whatever it is that was and explain? First, maybe, how the hell you all know each other? Then, _definitely,_ why you’re saying all that about people stealing things and coming to us after to place blame?”

“ _And_ also what you said about Torchwood,” the Doctor remembers to add. “There’s no UNIT or Torchwood anymore. At least not when _I_ called to check.”

Jack pauses for a second to ask, “What year is this?”

“2020?”

“Yeah, well, Torchwood Cardiff in _the past_ had something stolen. That’s what I meant.”

Bill puts a hand on her hip.

“Still not what _I_ asked,” she says. “Why us?”

“You? Nobody said anything about, love,” River says, empathetically. She points a finger at Heather: “It’s her. We’ve said.”

Bill stays quiet for a moment.

“Yeah, but that’s impossible.” She looks at Heather, strangely quiet up to now. “What proof do you have? Or does space law work on whims?”

River and Jack exchange an exasperated glance.

“Anything to say or disprove?” the Doctor tells them. “Because if not, I’d suggest you’d start by apologizing to my friends and then finish up by leaving. There’s a party tonight we’d planned on enjoying.”

Without any equipment to locate extraterrestrial lifeforms in short distances, River and Jack can say nothing or even explain that they’re here following traces of time rift energy and their own hunches in the dark. Not even that it’s been the work of over a year and that now, finally, when they’ve got it, she’s there to defend who she shouldn’t, only because she doesn’t understand their situation and point of view.

“Alright, I’ve had enough of you two,” Heather finally speaks. Her arms are crossed tightly over her chest, and when she lifts up her head and looks at River and Jack squarely, she no longer embodies any of the petiteness that comes with her physical form. “You want the rift artifact? Fine, I’ll lead you to it. Just stop pestering me and my girlfriend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t close your eyes, dear, don’t you be nervous. You put this whole damn place in a spell” and the rest of the bits from the first song Missy and the Doctor dance to are from James Blunt’s _Time of Our Lives_ in [the playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nGKBLdSNYNJNZc4tH8TQi). 
> 
> I may have gone overboard and added like a good six songs on there only for the dancing bits.


	12. The truth of futures past

It’s as if someone had vacuumed the entire university away. A second away, there was music, pleasant and filling whatever space could be said to exist between the air and the floor. There’d been people, moving unprompted inside the room like little flies, buzzing away and against each other. Now, a moment later, Bill is only aware of the facts. Undeniable and distinct.

“How much do you know about the rift artifact’s whereabouts?” Heather asks River and Jack.

“A little,” they say.

“It’s still in the gang’s warehouse,” Heather explains. “I stole it from its proper caging, used it to travel back to Earth through what you call the Cardiff rift, and went back to hide it inside a higher security box of my own making, in a section of the warehouse where they won’t know to look for it. You’ll need my codes to open the caging. But I’m guessing you knew that or you wouldn’t be here _talking_ to me.”

Neither River nor Jack say a word.

“How… how long ago was all of this?” Bill asks, her voice still casual enough, if a little high-pitched.

Heather turns her face a little to the side so she can look at Bill when she tells her.

“Not much before we met. I’m sorry,” she says. “I came to this town so I could escape that life. I didn’t think I’d…”

“Sorry?” Bill says. “You don’t need to be _sorry._ ”

In a moment like this, with words and voice-modulation in her way, Bill hardly notices the difference between talking and the silence that follows. But the look Heather gives her, right next to her, feels like a knife through the heart. A cold, sharp knife that cuts life cleanly. And it would be beautiful, if it weren’t so very sad.

“No, no, no, no. Listen. I mean that. ‘Sorry’? What for? So you’re an alien? A very cute one. Did it hurt when you fell from the skies? Probably not because there’s spaceships and because if you walked through a rift or something, well, it’s not _literal_ falling or anything, but I can make that stupid joke now and it makes more sense than it might have before.”

“Bill, you’re rambling,” Heather barely manages to say. Her lower lip is trembling.

“Yeah, yeah, I am,” Bill’s breath explodes into a wet chuckle. Relief overfloods every single crevice of her. And shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t this be the kind of revelation that makes her cower in fear, that makes her realize their relationship stands on shaky foundations? “But it’s true. Gods, Heather. It’s true that it’s fine. Maybe I won’t have to necessarily make jokes, but honestly? What has changed between two seconds ago and now? We’re still us, and you’re still Heather to me.”

Heather’s sudden intake of breath chokes her up a little.

“You’re serious? You’re… you’re not angry that I’ve lied to you? That I’m… not like you? That my name’s not even Heather?”

And, if Bill has been waiting for a moment—and she has, with all her might, been trying to make time for it—then this is the one. She lunges forward to seize it as if time itself would disintegrate afterwards. Unafraid, unlike every single one of her many other failed tries, because now she knows what awaits on the other side of the door.

“Would it make you feel better if I told you I’ve been sort of lying about something similar for a while, too?”

Heather opens her eyes wide first, but then cannot help but join Bill in a bout of small, semi-hysterical giggling.

“The Doctor and Missy… They’re not just professors. To tell you the truth, I doubt they’re even qualified to teach, but they sure are fun to be in a classroom with. What they do is travel in space and time sometimes, and they invited me to join them at the beginning of the year. Oh, and they have this alien cat named Arthur? And I’ve been driving myself mad trying to tell you because, well, I thought you’d…” Bill shakes her head. She realizes now that the projection of Heather, normal Heather who disliked science-fiction and fantasy, was only ever a façade to believably sustain her humanity pretense. The real Heather, a bit deeper down, _came_ from a science-fiction story in real life. “I don’t know what I thought, honestly. But I kept it from you anyway because I was so scared you’d refuse me or think I was mad or… I don’t know.”

“So what I’m getting is…” Heather giggles. “We’re idiots.”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “We could’ve just… talked about this from the beginning, couldn’t we?”

“This is all very moving,” Jack interrupts cynically, “but Cardiff is getting massive activity of what we can only assume is _unregistrable_ —without that rift artifact—alien incursions from all times and places in the universe. My team and I need it to stop the rift from spewing so much stuff out at us and at least control when the temporally dislocated events come through. So if we could get a move on…”

At the mention of _controlling_ something as wild as a rift, powered by the instability of the time vortex pouring out of it, Missy’s mind expands. Could it be—?

All this time, she’s been barking up every last tree that she could spot in the distance until not even all of their wood combined could boost her machine, and yet she’d persisted deeper into clearings that were once forests. For the Doctor.

If she somehow got hold of this rift artifact, then she could stop wasting her potential on ideas that she never had much hope in. Gallifrey was deemed unbreachable and would still remain so with the technology she had so far. But aided by some modified rift manipulator, a TARDIS powered up to its maximum capability, and having fully understood the nature of the Gallifrey bubble as she thinks she does?

She could access it any moment, any place in the planet she wanted. And, if what Jack Harkness is saying has any real basis, she could do so _unseen._ She could rescue Clara Oswald and return without anyone even noticing she’d arrived there in the first place until it was too late for them to do anything.

Her only problem now entails finding the object itself before anyone does so she’ll have time to make herself a copy. _Or I could always steal it._ The thought irrupts and lingers long enough to leave a mark on her conscience. But she knows by now that it would never sit well in her hearts if she did that, she’d rather just wait, stick around, and see how this all develops, and what it develops into.

“Not to mention,” River says, “Torchwood aren’t the only ones after it. I’m participating in… undergoing investigations that require rift and time vortex control as well. The fate of the universe depends on me finding it soon.” She side-eyes Jack, not antagonistically, mostly just with the intention to tease him. “Before Torchwood takes full custody.” She glances up at Jack a couple of times, like there was something she’s not quite done processing about him. “Here’s what I don’t get, though, Harkness. All this time, we’ve been after the same thing, but… it’s the Cardiff rift you and your team are dealing with, yeah? That thing has always behaved unstably, and always will—trust me, check the records. When it flares up, why not just call the Doctor to help?”

Jack’s tense laughter, which he manages without barely opening his mouth at all to let out his air, is enough of an answer, but he replies anyway.

“Oooh, yes,” he says in a mocking tone, “the Doctor. The Doctor, who thinks she’s got everything covered on Earth, but actually hardly ever does.”

The Doctor cranes her neck like at him an owl and flicks both ends of her scarf in his direction.

“I’m… sorry?”

“Look, I love you, Doctor, but you use Earth for the ego boost. The people on this planet have saved it more than you’ve ever saved it.” His blue eyes find hers, and there is nothing in what hides beyond them that she can even call forth as a lie to what he just said. Love, yes, but disappointment by the bucketful, piled on and on year after year. “They can’t depend on you for everything. So we don’t.” He shrugs. “And we won’t.”

Bill opens her mouth to say something, then closes it. She belongs to this Earth and would defend it in the same way Jack is if she needed to, if she was in the place he’s coming from, yet she has stood on cliffs in the opposite corner of the galaxy, waiting for the Doctor to make her final decision, over and over again. And the Doctor always chose to stay, for the people who needed answers they alone could never find. It’s not just about grand gestures of saving a planet, or fending off a warrior race away from the skies. Sometimes, in Bill’s own experience, what matters more is showing up, doing one’s best. Doing what nobody else can, swiftly, gently. But nobody can shoulder the entire weight of all things and peoples, especially not forever. Nobody should be expected to.

And if everything Bill’s grown to find out about the Doctor is true—all those many lives, all those many losses—then she thinks the Doctor’s been carrying the weight alone, on and off, for a long time, pretending that words like Jack didn’t affect her.

Heather stares at all of them.

“You literally don’t need the Doctor now to get what you came for. I just told you I will lead you to the rift artifact. So _let’s_ get a move on.” With all eyes on her, she explains: “I won’t have us teleport from here. Obviously.”

Missy shrugs. “All the better. The music’s started to be a little bit of a wham anyway. And not _literally_ Wham.”

River winks at her once they begin to make their way past the crowds and the tables.

As Heather guides them out of the theater room, through the dewy and chilly night on campus, and into the building where she has most classes these days, Bill realizes that if they’re going elsewhere, it’s because Heather has got means of extraterrestrial travel in the school.

“You keep alien tech stashed here?” she asks her curiously.

Up until now, their lives have been so normal that the sole thought of anything remotely extraordinary already existing in them before makes Bill’s skin prickle with excitement. She’d had all of this all around her and she’d never even considered to go looking for it _there_.

“’Course I do. And at home,” Heather says. She rubs her hands together to warm them up. Even inside the building, without the heaters on, it’s almost as cold as outdoors. “I’ve been fending these guys off on my own for over a year and a half. ”

“Wait—” Bill says. “Fending off how? Diverting signals or something?” She gasps. “Was the—was the warehouse you?”

Heather stops in the middle of a corridor.

“You’ve _been_ to the warehouse?”

The other four cease their three-fours of a slightly flirty conversation when they eavesdrop enough to figure out what the two of them are talking about.

“Yeah,” Bill says. “Was that you?”

Heather turns a few corners decidedly, then—

“Yes,” she mutters, looking down at her feet. “And all the electrical problems we’ve been having, that was a product of them trying to get to me, and me stopping them.”

“She’s been tenacious, your girlfriend,” River points out to Bill, laughing.

“Wait! And what about Arthur?” the Doctor asks a pace or two behind them, once she has popped her head in between Heather and Bill.

“Arthur?” Heather says.

“Oh.” Bill points her head towards Missy and the Doctor. “Their alien cat.”

Heather finally pauses by a small panel that does not look as if it has ever been used by the maintenance staff on campus in a while, and gently uncaps it without need for screwdrivers, sonic or otherwise. Whatever rests inside it makes River and Jack hold their breaths in silent recognition.

“Any alien lifeform aside from me must have fallen off through either their own teleporting system and temporal placement or the warehouse, one of those times,” Heather mutters. Carefully, she gets a single instrument outside of the panel’s empty space and attaches it to her wrist. “The warehouse gets stowaways sometimes. Easy to get in by mistake if you get zapped up in proximity to a teleport, not so easy to get out on purpose without one.”

Jack snorts.

“I suppose that’s how we ended up in there the first time, _you_ sent us,” he says.

Heather shrugs.

“I just deflected the signal you were using to get to me. I didn’t know where it would transport you.” She sighs. “I just hoped it’d be very far away.”

“Well, it didn’t work, did it?” Jack grumbles.

“Careful there, army man,” Bill says, coldly. “You’re the one getting a favor out of us here, not the other way around.”

“Oh, so this is about favors now? That creature over there is a thief, a con artist. You’d better know very well what you’re doing if you’re defending her. Do you?”

Heather rolls her eyes at Jack’s attempt at another comeback and turns back to face all of them.

“Right, this is already programmed to take us there and back, and modified for six passengers. Anyone who doesn’t want to go…” It’s hard to miss her quick glance at Bill.

Jack starts laughing, almost bellowing the sound out of his lungs and stomach, before anyone else can speak.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think you get to come,” River explains, louder than she’d meant to, since Jack seems quite intent on going on laughing for a while. “Now that we know for sure it’s _inside_ the warehouse—”

“Ah, so you didn’t inspect it thoroughly before?” Missy says.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you understand,” Heather tells River. “Only I have the passcodes to the box in particular where the rift artifact is, and there are _thousands._ Plus, it’s not a regular box. Other than the usual security measures, I made sure to add up an extra layer of code that the rest of the pirate gang can’t decode—probably. And, at the very least, they wouldn’t know how to find the box itself either.” Heather breathes out. “They have so many boxes in there…”

“That, they do…” Bill mutters.

“It’s a giant place, and the languages on the boxes are undecodable to us without a TARDIS, and we… well, we didn’t have one at the time,” River says gently.

“The Doctor’s got a—” Jack tries to invade everyone’s space with his long stride and his booming voice, but River presses a hand onto his chest to stop him at a distance.

“And we don’t need one now, do we?” River speaks directly to Heather now, level with her. “You’ll take us there? In and out?”

“Yeah,” Heather says, looking right at her.

“No traps?” River insists.

Her eyes seem to ask another question. _Why_? Everyone here right now has seen enough to ask that of anyone doing anything slightly off the charts. And, after so very long playing by blurry rules and lines on sand that get blown over by the wind, River still can’t help but ask it. To herself, but mostly to others, so she can understand.

“Keep wasting time, people,” Bill says, however. “It’s a teleport, not a vortex manipulator. And some of us have got class in the morning.”

This, in the end, is the why. So that, at the end of the day, there’s a home and a partner to come back to, and any alien threat or adventure can be, if not forever deterred, at least put off until tomorrow.

Five hands come to join each other on top of Heather’s right before she activates her teleport. Unsurprisingly, home is what they all seek. Home, if in different ways, places, …and people.

* * *

She can breathe, but it’s not automatic. She has to think about breathing in order to get her lungs to cooperate. Like when your scrolling down some social media website and someone _reminds_ you in a funny-not-funny post that your tongue is always just kind of sitting there in your mouth, and then you’re suddenly extra aware of it everywhere. She can feel the individual steps of each breath broken down into even smaller parts as she inhales and exhales in the void, in the loop of nothingness, and as she appears back into a solid world.

Even once she’s standing on the ground, Bill Potts’s breathing clutters inside her for a few seconds.

“This… was nothing like the TARDIS does it,” she mutters, holding her head. “Ow…”

She feels Heather’s hand on her shoulder.

“Bit wobbly the first time ’round, isn’t it?”

“Wobbly? I feel like someone just… cut me up me into tiny filets and then sliced me up in even smaller pieces to make… I don’t know. Lasagna. ”

The rest of the group watches without intervening.

“It will pass quickly, don’t worry,” the Doctor says. “All completely normal.”

“Quicker than that…” Jack mutters under his breath.

Bill takes a deep, deep breath, trying to notice as little about it as possible and realizing that it’s feeling more and more natural to her. When she straightens up, as gently as she can, the automation her body makes of the habit is already taking over for her again.

“Hey, has anyone ever told you you’re a bit of an asshole?” she tells Jack.

“Yes!” he says. “Has anyone explained to you what a temporal rift does, left unattended? I come from a few years back. That means the Cardiff rift has been behaving unpredictably, spitting out strange events, for _years._ Including the present.”

“No, actually. My knowledge of temporal rifts begins and ends with the literal words. Which makes _you_ even more of an asshole for A) not bothering to explain why you’re in such a hurry about this one, and B) being so bloody assholish about it, yeah?” Bill holds Heather’s hand, rising an eyebrow at Jack, and the two of them lead on the way into the warehouse’s dark, blueish corridors framed by concrete columns. “Now, off you pop, or else maybe that rift will spew you right out of your time zone, and we wouldn’t want _that_ …”

Everyone immediately moves to follow, heads down, but in the silence that encompasses the next few steps they take, River’s quiet giggles are unmistakable.

“I so love her energy…”

“Shut up, Song.”

For the most part of the ensuing many minutes, all they do is walk past rows and rows of stolen items, perfectly packaged in boxes not unlike the ones Bill had already seen the last time she was here. Everything remains exactly the same. The cold, steely air and that blueish fog that floods corners of it all, moving but barely in spirals that at least don’t lacerate the skin or poison the lungs.

Heather guides them out of rooms, messy with discarded boxes and opened boxes, but she never stops to explain a thing about them or to so much as look around the corners, just in case. Her confidence is unmatched, and Bill knows that the lack of fear in her own gut is not a good companion to that. Anything could happen and that would make them react slower to a possible threat. She has not forgotten the Doctor’s words spoken that day in this very warehouse about several alien species.

That day, because it was all new, they didn’t hit Bill as hard. She’d faced the unknown unafraid, almost wishing it sooner. Now, Bill’s excitement is only ever receding slightly in the back of her head, letting other memories through. Memories of all those alien places where small and everyday horrors comparable to Earth’s happened while she was there. Alien is not a novelty anymore, even if it remains promising, but it is still, as it ever was, a risk.

She thinks she can recognize some of what she is seeing now, and the false sense of safety, of knowing where she is, is her first clue, long before Heather turns around herself a couple of times, trying to head in several directions at once before deciding to go no further.

“Something’s not right…” Heather says to the group at large. The boxes around them, even outside the zones where they usually are left to rarely be retrieved, have been moved and placed in tidy arrangements by both sides of every corridor. “This is not how this area should look like. We’re way in deep now, this is mostly abandoned, normally. Especially _this_ area. That’s why I hid it here. No one comes looking around here unless an old item’s been ordered for shipping.”

Jack takes a couple of steps on the metallic floor. They echo across the emptiness, the quiet that surrounds them all. Everyone’s breaths are held, a little, as the sound reverberates and well after it dies.

His hands fiddle with one of the boxes, trying to get it open.

“That’s one of the locked ones,” Heather says. She points at the inscription written in several languages. “It says so over there. What you’re doing is pointless.”

And yet as he tries to pick the lock, the walls, the air, and even the floor begins to ooze out what can only be described as shrill noise.

“They’ve upped security with all these incursions we’ve _all_ been doing”, Heather exclaims. “I’d suggest we _run._ ”

“Yeah, that actually sounds like a _brilliant_ idea,” the Doctor seconds it.

Forward, as it may be the only way to go, they scatter, and crash and try to outrun the alarms. They deeper they go, they shriller they become, but forward is where the artifact is hidden, forward into the realm of alarms; terrible prophecies of the moment in which they are not the only thing ahead.

Bill will always remember it in slow motion. Heather, the first to run, the first to lead, falling. Instead of noise, a beam of something blue emerges from one of the ceiling corners in the dark and hits her right in the back. When she trips, her knees hit the ground first, and… Bill cannot stop it. Bill’s hand is not fast enough to hold her steady, to hold her up and close.

“ _Shit_ …” Heather groans, putting a hand to her own back, where Bill imagines all that concentrated blue hit her. “Shit, shit, shit.”

River and Jack sprint on forward. They don’t even see them, they don’t even see Heather sprawled over the metal floor, hurt and at the mercy of whatever’s coming. All they care about is their stupid rift artifact and getting there first. The Doctor sees. And the Doctor stops, half a step missed on her running and almost tripping as well. Missy and her almost recoil from the hurry of the chase almost at the same time to come to Bill. They’re both standing near Bill, and she tries not to think about the fact that the Doctor’s face is a deep frown, and Missy’s a profound state of sadness. Bill’s knees get scraped on the metal as she gets to Heather’s side.

“She’s risking her happy normal life, which she’s fought tooth and nail for, in order to get something for _you_ , and you’re just gonna, what, abandon her here?” Bill yells at River and Jack, effectively making them stay back with them, if a few steps further.

On Heather’s ruined blouse, under it, on the pale skin, there’s just a charred spot, as if someone had tried to burn plastic.

“There’s no blood…” Bill mutters. “Doctor, why is there no blood?”

Heather gives out a quiet laugh under Bill’s touch.

“I’m wearing a human shell,” she says, feebly. “The damage doesn’t… show here.” She tries to hold Bill’s hand and squeeze it. “It’s not as bad as it may seem. I’m not human, I won’t die as easily as you lot do.”

“Shut up, you, point still stands,” Bill tells her, holding back tears. “You’re risking it all for them, for what? And now it got you hurt…”

“If we can get her help—” the Doctor says, as seriously as she can.

In the Doctor’s eyes, Bill can almost trace what her thoughts might be. In her hands, she can follow a physical line to them. The Doctor’s webbing a plan, by using the sonic. But Heather’s flesh and bone, if not the kind Bill’s used to. She’s not a machine a sonic can get readings of and fix up in a heartbeat.

“There’s no time,” Jack says. He, too, must have read it off her just as easily. “If you all teleport back home with the kid, you’ll be stranding us here until the job’s done And those alarms don’t sound very encouraging. Alarms usually means there’s people coming for us.”

“She’s just been _shot_. Have a little respect,” River says. “Both you and I can hold our grounds for a while. Long enough, at least.”

“It’s fine. I’ll tell you what you need to know to get access. Just run on and go get it.” Heather says reluctantly in a huff of voice.

“No!” Bill says.

The Doctor stares at Heather and Bill, then sighs.

“If you choose to stay here and wait them out,” she tells Heather, “they might be a long while. Your alien friends could show up and then it’d be a real party.” Heather, Bill, and Missy give out a weak laugh. But the Doctor continues and it’s clear the joke was always meant to be short-lived. “Or you might get worse.”

“It’s fine,” Heather insists, but her voice is nothing more than a pant when she tries to speak normally. Her shell, although showing no signs of blood or any apparent flesh wounds, is getting paler in the face. “It’ll be quick enough. It takes a while for anyone to get down here from headquarters, anyway. Plus, the Judoon renegades from the gang that’ll be coming for us are pretty slow.”

“And their moral codes, brutal,” the Doctor adds somberly.

Time’s short. Time’s never not short. Bill’s memories swirl in her head, and flash at her images of those empty gravestones, those inscriptions in golden circles and hexagons that she couldn’t understand except for the one time. She thought, being there, she’d become one. But… she’s not the one on the floor. All this time trying to protect Heather from a life Bill herself hadn’t even fully engaged with in fear of involving her, and when they both do, Heather gets hurt. Time’s so short that it makes life unfair.

River and Jack waste no second of it in approaching them so that Heather can tell them exactly where the box is and how to crack it open.

The first few levels of security are encrypted each in the language of the main species, but should be easy for them to bypass by memorizing which keys to press on the number printed on the box as she is describing to them now. It’s the final level, as it turns out, that they would have needed Heather for the most. The gang could only break into it by working together, all species at once, and even then… Heather says she was the only member of hers. They would have had trouble with her layer of security as well as her final touch on the lock.

She explains it all in strained shaky mutters that conceal so much that Bill doesn’t want to even think about. All she can do is hold Heather’s hand and battle the graveyard in her memories into oblivion.

“I put a digital lock on it. It’ll only let you access it by touch once the other levels are done,” Heather concludes. “It’s basic binary code. Earthian.”

“Yeah, we’re… we’re familiar,” River says with a reassuring, almost motherly smile that contrast heavily with Jack’s stark cold features.

Bill tries not to look at his face, she tries not to blame anyone for these except terrible odds, but his indifference, whatever his reason for it, is not well-received when all he _would have_ to do is feign a little concern for the people he’s stranded alongside his team.

“The password’s _the potts to my kettles_ ,” Heather tells him. “And, yes, make it double T for pots as well.”

“That’s one long line of code,” Jack notes.

“And an impenetrable one, at that,” Bill says, a little breathless, a little shivery. She understands the magic of a code like that, and the danger of it being out in the open now.

She sniffles in a couple of tears.

She’s in it, she’s part of the password. And Heather has had to disclose it, because she’s not going to make it.

Bill cannot think herself out of that thought, the one thought that is everywhere in movies, in books, in audio adventures. Everywhere she turns, people like Bill and Heather rarely survive fiction, rarely get to live their lives in a nice flat with a cat and some prospects. But… it’s Heather’s life that’s on the line now. Bill’s just in a line of code, waiting to be pressed onto a keyboard.

“Aliens don’t work well with spelling mistakes in English, or turns of phrase doubly turned into something else, then transferred on to binary, do they?” Bill mutters.

“Some species do know binary code,” Heather mumbles. “That’s why I didn’t put numbers on the pad, just in case. Up is 1, down is 0.”

“Got it, then,” River says, nodding. She fishes an entire gun out of her utility belt, which her jacket had been hiding very well until now. “Stay put. Won’t be very long.”

“I’ll go with you,” Missy says. She rises from the floor. “I’ll be needing to take a look at that artifact of yours for a project I’m working on that could really benefit from temporal displacement.” Bill notices the Doctor mouth to her ‘the matrix? Still?’, but Missy doesn’t respond. “ _And,_ lucky for you, I’m very good with locks and memory games.”

“Uh…” Jack says. “No? Last time I saw you, you were going to _destroy_ —”

“Harkness, she’s not _how_ you remember her,” River warns him. “And… if my math’s right, I think we’re going to have to let her see it. ”

She looks at the Doctor, at Missy, with the knowledge of someone who has walked the future briskly, absurdly, and bravely. But that, Bill soon learns, is just River Song, living backwards the time that has already happened.

“Have we done the first page of the new diary yet?” River asks the Doctor. In one second of puzzled silence, she gets her answer. “Never mind. I don’t think I ever flirt with the Master in that body again or that I ever did before so that’s a no.”

“Was that flirting? Couldn’t tell?” Missy says, definitely with seductive intentions.

The alarms keep blaring around them. A very poignant reminder that they’re wasting precious seconds arguing, talking, and not _moving._

“She’s not coming with us,” Jack insists, arms crossed.

“No, she’s not. I will,” The Doctor says.

She stands up as well, and Bill can capture in slow moment the precise instant in which the Doctor’s eyes meet Missy’s and an unspoken conversation takes place. Permission is being asked, tasks delegated, and jokes interchanged, even. The Doctor might be _the_ Doctor mostly everywhere all the time, but without any equipment to work with, she can’t be _a_ doctor. And yet… the way she’s lingering on Missy, Bill cannot help but feel that the Doctor thinks so highly of Missy that she trusts Missy can be that and more, in a crisis or otherwise.

It brings her enough relief, with Heather’s hand slowly getting limper in her own, and the buzz of empty graves stirring images of more.

Before possibly facing more blue bolts like the one that got Heather, as she and Jack move on towards the corridor and the line that will trigger more blue, River glances into Missy’s eyes for a second.

“I’ll see to it that you get what you need,” she says. “Because you _will_ need it.”

* * *

“What do you know that you’re not telling, River?” the Doctor asks her. Many other times, she’s asked that question in fury, in search for answers, but right now she’s more curious and tired than angry.

River smiles at her. A brief, sweet thing, improper of a woman who would commandeer time itself if time could be stolen and repurposed. And sometimes it can.

“Shhh,” she says. “Spoilers.”

“Will you two ladies shut up?” Jack says in a much more relaxed tone than the one he’d used back with the rest of the group. “What with the alarms and you, if there’s anyone coming, I won’t hear them until they’re right on us.”

“Not a lady,” the Doctor says. “And you’d think we can all listen for intruders, eh, Captain?”

But they do try to keep quiet and move fast until they reach the deepest area in the warehouse, hidden within many other deepest areas, rooms filled with discarded items and boxes torn open and chemically wasted in corners that reek of time.

Despite having never collaborated together like this, their instincts kick in as soon as Heather’s words echo in their heads and they spot the one box that every other pair of eyes would have missed. Because it has been put in all that chaos and confusion _to be missed._ Buried under other boxes, in the same worn colors and labeling that everything else sports.

River picks it up carefully. She wrinkles her nose.

“Stinks,” she says.

Jack tries to grab the box out of her hands.

“I’ll do it,” he says.

“No, you won’t. You’ve been acting like the big boy around here, hiding behind your great reason for doing this. Bragging about it, in fact. But you were mulling during the entire debriefing that poor girl gave. You’re not getting anywhere near this.”

River puts the box as far away from Jack as she can.

“I can enter the codes, you can both convene on remembering them?” the Doctor says, shrugging. “I type fast. And if you forget anything, well, I was there too, wasn’t I? Three heads think further, faster, and better than one.”

River and Jack glare softly at each other for a second before nodding like toddlers caught red-handed at rendering the bare walls of a flat into a cubist painting.

At first, when they get to it, they try to be careful in the input to get past of every layer of security, remembering quickly enough and letting the Doctor confirm and key it in. But then, as they go on, a comment leads to another, and full bickering resurges.

“All this crap about me doing it for a city, sure!” Jack says. “But what about you, Song? An investigation, really? You’re in a pissing contest with me and the city I want to save for an _ongoing_ investigation? Isn’t that _big_ of you, now.”

“You small-minded buffoon… What was I going to call it? I called it an investigation because I couldn’t very well go around _telling_ people who I’m looking for. The truth, bits and pieces of it, that’s what I told people. Including you, unfortunately for your ego.”

“And who might you _be_ looking for that makes it worth sacrificing time itself? Do tell me now.”

“Who I’m always looking for. Who everyone looks for at some point in their lives. Because she’s impossible to find when you need her. She just… pops up in the middle of nowhere, by chance, and then saves the day or builds it from scratch. But when she leaves, she forgets you always end up needing her a little more than when she arrived. When she leaves _me_ , she forgets she’s leaving behind someone who loves her enough to actually go looking.”

Jack says nothing.

“So, you save Cardiff, Captain Jack Harkness. There’s honor in doing what you do. But let me handle my personal business.”

“I didn’t know, I’m sorry. You never said—” he says.

“The code, now,” River insists, her jaw tense.

They keep working for a couple seconds, then—

“I was in your shoes once. Muddy terrain, huh?” He laughs softly. “I understand.”

“Oh, I doubt you do.”

Jack grins and, after a beat, he says:

“Doesn’t she do this _lovely_ thing with her chin?”

The Doctor, who has been standing there all the time and very much processing the conversation at speeds a little slower than they were happening, interrupts them:

“You know, it has been quite a while, but I’ve learned this texting thing that’s popular now. You could text me! And I could come to your aid in no time!”

“Everybody knows you only come in times of dire need,” River says, muffling her amusement.

“Is _professional_ advice dire need?” Jack says, probably remembering an incident on the job here or there. “Because I could have used a hand once or twice.”

Then he laughs. He did have a hand, cut off from the Doctor, laying around in his hub for a while. Not that it did much good.

“I’m serious. Texts are useful these days. And _way_ more reliable than vortex manipulators.” She stops herself the second she has processed what was said not that long ago about _needing_ her, and not precisely about professional matters. “And I do _not_ do any ‘thing’ with my chin!”

“Yes, you do,” both Jack and River answer distractedly, getting their hands on the box in order to input code on it when the Doctor’s too flabbergasted to this time.

The Doctor rubs at her chin like it’s a magic lamp.

“You people with the kissing me thing…” she says. “What do you want me to do if not kiss back? Slap you? Because I could slap you.”

* * *

If she’s bleeding out of another body, being depleted of what keeps her alive, why is everything so dry, why is her blouse only a little burned?

They’ve turned her over, Bill’s held her up on her thighs, and Missy’s trying to… Bill’s not sure what Missy’s trying to do. Missy told them as soon as the others left, that she’s trying to fix Heather’s real body without turning the shell off, but it’s not an easy task without equipment. There’s little to be done except wait for some stupid side mission to be completed. While Heather fades away in Bill’s arms.

Her entire skin’s is too pale, even for her complexion, and she can only talk in whispers, but she isn’t talking at all. Bill’s not letting her say a word, in case any of them is the last. Bill’s just squeezing her hand and waiting, her heart pounding slow in her chest, for the feeble squeeze back and the slight curve in Heather’s lips that means it’s all going to be okay.

Sometimes, some squeezes come accompanied by a susurrus that sounds like ‘I don’t die as easily as you lot, Bill, it’ll all be alright’. But seconds tick away, and each time it’s harder for Bill to believe it. To hear it.

Heather gave it all up to live a normal life and, Bill, who has spent hers trying to run away from both normalcy and life, now only wants to laugh—and not in amusement—at the beauty of it that she can feel more than ever, because it’s being taken away.

Bill wipes her tears, her snot, and everything else from her face, sniffs it all in, and looks at Missy’s hands. Steady, just like they are on any machine. If only now there were nuts and bolts to put back into place.

Missy glances at her and grins for a moment. Just one.

“I once built a gun out of leaves, dear, ” Missy reassures her. “We’ll manage, you’ll see.”

Bill nods nervously. From Missy, she will believe it. That there is a way, and that it will come soon enough. She wants to. She doesn’t know how to keep existing in this moment otherwise. She doesn’t understand how that person, on the floor, dying but not dead, can be Heather. Not right now, not even with the memory playing back in her head.

“Hey,” Heather murmurs now. “Don’t think about it.”

Bill has to wipe her eyes again and force a smile out of her entrails, out of the slime and the dirt and every part of her she doesn’t think ever could produce anything but discomfort.

“I’m not thinking about it,” Bill tells Heather.

“You are. A little. But I’m _fine_. I’m really fine…”

Heather closes her eyes and Bill’s entire conception of reality fractures.

“Heather?” Her very breath shakes.

She looks for motion in Heather’s torso. Anything. Bill’s own heart feels as if it were plummeting down from above when Heather’s chest finally rises and falls.

“You know, I struggled so hard with you,” Heather mumbles, keeping her eyes closed. “You liked sci-fi so much, I thought… I thought, for the hell of it, I could tell you one day. And maybe you’d believe me.”

Bill’s smile floods her, a wave of nothing but those many times she had wondered if Heather herself would believe _her_ , and a realization that shocks her into stillness now.

“I’d like to think I would have,” Bill says, voice breaking. “I really would. But I don’t know what I’d—” Her breath hisses as she takes it in. “I don’t know if I would’ve been ready, Heather. I had to see it in front of me to believe it when it happened to me.” She laughs wetly. “And then I had the nerve to—to think you’d _shun_ me if I told you what I’d seen. I’m so stupid… It’s my fault, if I’d stayed put, we wouldn’t be here now and—”

Heather breathes in, a deep inhale that fills her inside.

“Maybe you wouldn’t. Because I would have managed to send you away at the party,” she says. She opens her eyes to look into Bill’s. Bill feels, emanating from Heather, a current of something warm, soft. Something that eases what’s ailing her inside. “But I still would. It’s not your fault.”

They remain quiet for some time, letting Missy handle the silence filled with the noise of alarms and the lack of many things meanwhile. Then, Heather wets her lips and speaks again.

“My planet’s blue,” she mutters. “Not like Earth’s. a gentle, light blue. Without any clouds. Its atmosphere would kill almost anything that lives here and yet… there, the elements that it was made of were nothing impressive to us.”

She laughs softly to herself, lost in memories that Bill cannot know how long they date back. But they are shared now, and in a way, she knows Heather is letting her have them because Bill desperately needs a window, a door, into something else.

“We got invaded a few times while I was there. My family got separated. My home, blown up in the wars. I joined several rebellions to fight back, rebuilt my city and others from scratch. Then they destroyed it all again, just because they could.”

Even out in the universe, the worst of nature emerges and settles, and people existing in it have to endure. Bill makes a fist.

“Some people began to talk about just leaving, and one day I met a member of this gang. And I thought joining would give me a sense of family again, of having something to do that… somehow helped me forget.” Heather looks at her again, and Bill can see, without seeing. She can imagine every step of that road, longer than she can conceive of. “All the things I learned, Bill. All the species I got in touch with because of it... And then I read about Earth. All that quietude you humans have, even among all the terrible things that happen to you, because of you. I fell in love with that. The gang decided some of us would have to go off-planet for intel, so I chose Earth, to be close to that terrible beauty.” Bill laughs because Heather says it. “For some time, I did my job like I was supposed to. I didn’t know yet, just how fast I was running away from what I was supposed to love. Then I got tired of the stealing, and the secrets, so I stole back. I came to Bristol, putting all my history behind, all that life I had with spaceships and species and smuggling. I thought I’d be able to escape it a little, at least. Enough… When I met you, I realized it would never have been worth it, a double life. Not because I didn’t like being an alien pirate, but because I liked being a normal human with you more.”

Their hands squeeze each other. Bill puts another on Heather’s. Three hands, two hearts. An alien and a human.

“Do you have any idea how _hard_ I’ve always wanted to escape regular life and its regular terrors? How… scared I was that when I finally told you about the alien stuff I’d seen, you wouldn’t understand and would do something terrible? All I ever wanted was to escape,” Bill rambles on, shrilly, quickly, and shakily. “But the thing is… I can _have_ a double life. How couldn’t I see that before? That’s exactly what I want. A life with Heather Arbenoir at home, a normal life. And then traveling with the Doctor, for as long as I can, to see beauty and terrors different than my own, to escape from them.”

“Are you… asking me for permission?” Heather asks, humorously.

“No. I’m… I’m telling you. Finally.”

“Tell me everything, Bill.” Heather closes her eyes too slowly now. “I’d love to hear it.”

Bill has seen little, but it has been enough. Planets with dark ocean water and species that started out one way and had grief turn them the opposite. She has seen stars shine and die, she has seen chemicals in the air transform the science she thought she understood from school, and she has seen the Doctor and Missy move in all of it like they belonged all the time.

“We had to spend five days trapped in the TARDIS because she wouldn’t take off. Five days on an alien planet, could you imagine that? You popped your head out and could die from the chemicals in the atmosphere, and also the air smelled weirdly like ham.” Missy muffles a chuckle, remembering as Bill tells it to Heather. “The Doctor spent her time arguing with the TARDIS and trying to make the ham-air edible, which she did manage. And it wasn’t poisonous or anything once it was solid. But… I sat down and read so much. So, so much. On knowledge and history that Earth will not be aware of for millennia. All those people in there, they’ll live and die without ever so much as knowing the names their children will choose for the stars that are yet to be born will be their own names. And… the machinery, the things humankind invents… For five days, I sat down with Missy and tweaked tech that will not exist even centuries after my death. And then I came home and…” Bill laughs quietly. “You said that new movie about astronauts was unrealistic because the planet they were stranded in isn’t even that big.”

“Should’ve been a clue, shouldn’t it?”

Heather tries to laugh, and yet she can’t. She can’t anymore. Bill pretends not to notice, not to see, not to hear. She pretends all they have is these stories, these touches of the past and the notions of the future they could have built, if they’d been braver together.

She talks about Missy as a parental figure to her, in the oddest and kindest of ways, as she is still being and now not only just to her, and about the Doctor as a bit of a savior figure in all her darkness, even. Bill talks about herself as a traveler, about those cliffs in the cold and by the sea, and how that day she didn’t change anything, she unraveled it, she saw it, observed, and tried to understand it, equated it to what she knew from home.

“And I know so little, all I want is to know more, learn more to do better more often if I can. Especially now that I know you are part of that.”

“Heather?” Missy asks, interrupting them. “I’m sorry, dear. But I really need you to shed your shell or I won’t be able to do anything else like this. I’m really, really sorry, but you’re getting worse...”

Heather glances anxiously at Bill.

“No. Not with her here,” she says.

“When we get back to Bristol, the Doctor has equipment I can use to link both your forms together so that anyone can operate on you without you having to switch, but… not here, not empty-handed,” Missy says. “I could… I could fake some blood, to help sell the idea when we take you to the hospital.”

“Can’t you just help her yourselves on the TARDIS?” Bill asks.

“Yeah, but… she won’t shed the shell with you there,” Missy says, empathetically. “And you can’t leave her, Bill.”

The very next second, Bill watches her bite into her own skin until blood oozes out. It pours on Heather’s clothes. Then, Missy licks and sucks at her own hand, like it was no big deal.

They have nothing left to devote themselves to, helpless and alone, in a dark corridor where alarms blare and danger is imminent. Nothing but waiting, because Heather won’t save herself without saving everyone else. She won’t leave anyone behind, even if they would have left _her._

Bill’s fury doesn’t last. It can’t burn on when everything else is already turning to ash around her, not even when her surroundings are still hot. It all turns into winds of uncertainty. Into a noise that they can’t shut off, and ghosts of footsteps on every corner.

Then, Heather’s hand tenses in her own.

“It’s them…” she mutters. “They’re here.”

Hard thuds on metal, rhythmical enough. Slow, but timely. And a cacophony of smaller footsteps trying to hide from them.

Bill doesn’t ask about the ‘them’. She just glances apprehensively at Missy.

“Don’t let go of Heather,” Missy tells her, grabbing Heather’s left wrist as well.

“Go, go, go, go!” come the voices from the corridor. “I’ll distract them while you get out of here.”

“You can’t distract them on your own!”

“Don’t be an idiot, Jack, and just run!”

The violent thuds make the ground beneath Bill vibrate. They must be getting nearer now. Whoever _they_ are. Finally, those aliens she thought she might meet on her first day, when now she has no desire left to meet them.

River, Jack, and the Doctor rush out of the darkness, breathless, almost crashing against each other and against the columns around them.

“Judoon exiles,” the Doctor says, hands on her hips as she tries to catch her breath. “Way more pissed off than normal.”

“Without their jurisdiction and their rules,” Heather says from the floor, “they’re worse than their normal. They’re ruthless.”

“Do you have it?” Missy asks River.

She tosses the rift artifact into Missy’s free hand.

The thuds from the Judoon’s heavy footsteps now become thunder around them, and the darkness parts to show the heads of a race that allows no quarter.

“Get a hold on Heather!” the Doctor orders. “Now!”

She makes room for herself by Bill, as River and Jack put their hands on Heather’s shoulders, and before the Judoon can so much as fully enter the corridor, the Doctor activates the teleport to take them back home.

Home… An office in a building without lights. Home, the inside of a TARDIS. Five of them carry one in, leave Heather on the very floor as the Doctor hurries somewhere in the depths to fetch what she needs.

Heather’s unconscious now. Bill doesn’t know exactly when she lost that last spark, all she knows is that _she_ is standing there, away from the console to let the Doctor work, and existing outside of the bubble of the present, because in the present her only thought is that there’s something so very wrong with Heather being on the floor, because Heather deserves better than that. _Bill_ deserves better than that. and it’s not fair, any of this, when the TARDIS is supposed to stand as a vessel for infinity, not for clutching tension in her chest, not for uncertainty.

By Bill’s side, Missy studies the rift artifact in silence, without need for taking notes, only her sonic sunglasses. And, at least, River and Jack have the decency of staying quiet and meek and respectful about all of it.

The Doctor works fast, getting tubes into Heather, probing her skin and making machines whir when she does. Bill twists her own fingers over and over again for the longest minutes of her life until the Doctor looks up at her from the floor.

“It’s done. Both her forms are linked.” The Doctor jumps up to her feet, to her console and her levers. “We can take her to the hospital now.”

In the short time that it takes to land, Bill kneels again by Heather, Missy returns the rift artifact to River and Jack, leaving the sunglasses laying around on the console, and goodbyes become rushed in the air.

“No need for a ride anywhere,” Jack assures the Doctor as he helps carefully carry Heather out of the TARDIS. “We’ll take it from here.”

He nods at the apparatus on his own wrist.

“Thanks for the help, Doctor. It’s always good to see you. Although… last time, you were this long skinny thing in a coat…”

Jack laughs when he recalls those days, not so far away in his memories as they are in hers.

Behind him, River and Missy close the TARDIS doors, and try and comfort Bill as they walk closer to the ER building, where they’ve almost parked.

“You’ll see that me again,” the Doctor tells Jack, somberly. “You know how this works.” She glances up at him. “I am sorry, you know?”

“For what?”

“Not living up to what you expected and needed of me.” She looks behind her, at Bill, having to live through something no one should. Bill, who the Doctor swore to herself over and over she wouldn’t let any of this hurt or ruin in any way. “When you see me again, I’ll still fail tremendously at it, Jack.”

“You’re the Doctor,” he says, in a simplicity very uncommon for Jack, and a sign of his utmost honesty. “I’ll just have to forgive you.”

They leave Heather in good care, in professional hands and professional voices that soothe them, in the waiting room, that waiting is all they can do. That everything will be fine. But isn’t that what they always say until they can’t say it anymore?

Missy sits with Bill on one of the chairs by the corner of the brightly-lit room, an arm around her shoulder, and the Doctor makes all the efforts she can to sit with them, but she keeps getting up, because she knows River and Jack aren’t staying much longer.

And she knows the last conversations she has with River always feel more like prophecies than anything that ever came from the mouths of actual prophets.

“So,” River tells her when the Doctor finally approaches her.

“Spoil me?”

River guffaws like only she can, throwing her head full of brown-blond curls back, and putting an arm on the Doctor’s shoulder.

Her face, when the smile dies, is a mirror of every last bout of anxiety the Doctor has swallowed for the past many months.

“It is all going to be alright, you know?” River says. “It always is, in the end, isn’t it? You’re here to make sure it is. And you’ll always be.”

Whether she likes it or not, the Doctor has little choice but to believe that. So much can fit between ‘alright’ and ‘the end’ and ‘here’, though, that she’s not sure she wants to begin approaching that in-between infinity right now, right in this very place.

The Doctor raises an eyebrow at River, chasing those ghastly thoughts away with something shiny that has been nagging at her since earlier, too.

“You weren’t even surprised to see me like this, were you?.”

“Next time I will be,” River promises. Her hand slides gently onto the Doctor’s arm, and she squeezes gently. “Next time, you can count on a _splurge_ of a reaction. I’d so been waiting for this.”

“You cheeky woman,” the Doctor says. If they weren’t in a hospital waiting room, their hearts clenched in anticipation of news of Heather’s health, she might have exclaimed those words instead of just softly spoken them. “With all you know about both our futures, and you’re still excited about the little things…”

“Isn’t it all about the little things, Doctor? With you and me?”

That takes the Doctor by surprise.

“Yeah, I suppose,” she says.

She then remembers what River and Jack said about her, before, what had taken them both to hunt down a rift artifact together, the most unlikely people to meet, gather, and work in that fashion.

“River.” The Doctor calls her name, because names, for her, have more power than she lets on, even when it’s public knowledge that she has hidden her own and hidden behind another she chose herself. “Don’t go looking for me, I don’t turn up where I should, most of the time. Most of the time, I’m nowhere. Or everywhere at once, it’s complicated. _Call_ for me instead.”

She leans forward to whisper into River’s ear. Two things, she whispers. 

“That’ll get my attention,” the Doctor says. “Because you’re not supposed to know that. No one living, aside from…” She glances back at Missy. “Is supposed to know that.”

River looks into the Doctor’s eyes for a moment, then strokes her face gently. She lingers, because she can, and because every second she doesn’t is a second the both of them will remember and regret later.

“Don’t forget those left behind, Doctor, and don’t forget that ‘living’ and ‘dead’ are categories that time has rendered useless, ” River says, her voice a little too sad, and kisses the Doctor’s cheek. “Goodbye, sweetie.”

She and Jack leave, and then it’s just Bill, Missy, and the Doctor in the corner of the waiting room. Thankfully, it’s not very long until a doctor emerges from the double doors to tell them that that Heather will need to stay the night and perhaps a few days, but that she’s otherwise stable and okay.

Bill breathes easy at the news and lets out all the tears at once as the other two hug her silently. They have to wait a little more as Heather’s taken to a room upstairs to be debriefed in the corridor about how she’s doing. Because it’s so late, no visitors are allowed, and the Doctor has to sonic Bill’s way in.

The three of them stand by Heather’s bed. The paleness on her will not recede for a while, but she’s conscious now, as if she had sensed them coming.

“Hey…” Heather mutters to Bill. Her hand flutters like a hummingbird heart in order to try and find Bill’s.

“Hi, you. They patched you up.”

“Mhmmmm… All’s good now.”

Bill turns to Missy and the Doctor.

“Would you—would you mind?” she says. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow. I just…”

“Yeah, of course. Take care of yourself, dear,” Missy says.

“You, too, Heather. Have a speedy recovery,” the Doctor says.

Once they’re alone in the room, Heather actually, really chuckles, softly as it has to be because there’s not any energy left in her.

“See? Alien is danger,” she jokes. “I told you.”

“No, you didn’t, Heather. I think I discovered that on my own, hanging out with those two,” Bill jokes back. She clutches the sheets on Heather’s bed. “My point is, it’s not all like today. _You_ are not like _today._ That’s my point. So, alien’s not all bad. We just got very unlucky.”

“I know…” Heather sighs, long and deeply. “But if you’re going to go out there again, please promise me you’ll be careful. It’s not all wonderful, it’s not all good people who will stay with you when you’re down.” Bill chuckles wetly. “It’s just like Earth. Terrible and beautiful. You can’t even really run away from that. You’d have to…” Heather takes another deep breath that sounds like she’s close to falling asleep. “Run away from yourself.”

* * *

The Doctor leans on the TARDIS doors, tugging at the ends of her red scarf.

“She finally got the truth out of her,” she says with a short smile, looking out at the hospital building where a few windows let out the light of the bedrooms. She wonders if Bill did turn Heather’s on. “Although maybe not in the way she expected.”

Missy echoes her smile with a short soft laugh.

“Maybe it’s better like this, poor thing. She was terrified of coming clean.”

“Yeah, we’re all terrified of the truth,” the Doctor says. “Telling it, hearing it… But I don’t think I could live—”

—a gash of noise, teleporting yellow particles, then—

“Finally…” That voice. Missy knows that voice.

Gat’s face emerges from the yellow.

“Finally!” Gat repeats.

The Doctor’s sentence gets cut halfway by all of it. The Doctor is swallowed by yellow, brought away into the vortex, without even the TARDIS left behind. Missy can only watch. Missy can’t even react and grab hold of either the Doctor, that Gat, or the ship. Missy stands behind in the nothingness.

She knows it, then. She has failed them both.

The one time the Doctor wasn’t worried, was finally free to have fun with her friends, to dare to have adventures and meddle with alien technology again, and it has happened. It has finally happened. But not to her friends, no. To _her_.

Why couldn’t Gat take Missy instead?

Why couldn’t Gat have recognized her as another Time Lord? As a traitor to the Council who fought in the wrong side of the war?

Missy can’t take in a single breath. She can’t shed a single tear. What is she to do now? She can’t follow them to Gallifrey, not yet _._ Even if Gat has found a way to teleport a TARDIS, Missy can’t. She’d need _time_. She has to ask for help. But who? She has no friends. Nobody who would stand with her, not even for the Doctor. She falls to her knees, and the irregular paving of the road scrapes her pantyhose and, eventually, her skin. Even if she wanted to reach the Doctor’s friends, River or Jack or whoever, she has no connection to them in her TARDIS, which is back in her fucking office, a city away, a _night_ away. And Bill, a good person who might help anybody who asked… Bill’s upstairs with her girlfriend in the bloody hospital!

Missy can’t breathe. Her stomach hurts. Her lungs burn inside her. She can’t do this alone. She has never known how to be alone, but now… She doesn’t know how to do this.

She falls on the ground, she grasps at nothing because there’s nothing. She gasps at the air she can’t even guide inside her, because everything’s burning, and everything’s falling. And it’s her fault.

She helped the Daleks burn down the first city in Gallifrey. And now the Doctor’s been kidnapped to help Gallifrey burn _back_ and beyond.

* * *

“—on a lie”

Those words, that sentence, here, are out of place. But maybe it’s just the place itself that’s _out_. One second ago, she was waiting to go inside her own TARDIS and fly, just fly with Missy until morning. One second after, all there is around here is the inside belly of a cube, with walls made of something ugly and rough and atemporal.

A cell, perhaps. A way to separate time from its inhabitants.

Maybe that second was longer away into her memories, or a millisecond ago. Maybe it never existed.

She presses her head against a side of the cube and notices how different it all is to Earth’s constant hum of something alive or alive wanna-be.

In here, there’s only—

“Doctor?” someone says across the thick wall before her; a voice between confused and unbelieving, a little bit too hopeful.

And if it wasn’t so crazy, she could swear it’s Clara Oswald’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a curious note! When I finished these last two chapters, all originally titled in its entirety _The Joys of Just Tonight_ , it all penned around 20k, so I decided to split it into two, and came up with _The Truth of Futures Past_ for this chapter in reference to River knowing about the events of the third installment in the series (but also because it’s sort of similar to X-Men Days of Future Past and well… that made me happy ^^)
> 
> (If you want some extra feels, listen to _If The World Was Ending_ by JP Saxe during the last few scenes. Works like a charm)


	13. Choose well

When the very core of who you are is stripped away, without warning, without explanation, the hole that is left behind in its place becomes excruciating to fill for the next many hours until you’re you again.

It happens twelve times for thirteen selves and then it’s just someone else’s genetic problem for their allotted portion of eternity.

Except that this time, Missy cannot grow into herself again. Because she hasn’t died and been reborn. Her core has just been torn from her insides, cut out and taken. The next many hours won’t return it to her, not unless she steals it back herself.

_I am what made her._

The last and the first to rebel. The first and the last to stand together, never again, and then always. Until the end of time itself and even after.

_And she is what makes me._

Hours, days. Weeks wouldn’t make a difference. The Doctor has gone where Missy cannot follow. Not yet.

So Missy goes nowhere. Days, hours spent inside, seeing neither sun nor moon nor star or skies, only engines, only grease and impossible riddles to solve, even with new clues. She rises and lives in the same room, breathes and exhales only one law: sit there and create something that will shatter the rules of time itself, just like the Time Lords have, so she can find what has been taken from her.

But if the hours don’t weigh down, days do. And eventually, even stubbornness isn’t enough to drive her. She has to stand up and leave the center of the only chaos she can still control.

There is nothing in this TARDIS. Appliances to make food, bedding so that she won’t be cold, her tools and her astronomy notes for class (now discarded somewhere she doesn’t even remember how to get to), patio furniture under the console room, Arthur’s toys and pet care items, and a room in construction that Missy locked away intermittently when she moved into another TARDIS.

Instinct, perhaps, if not fleeting recollections of the summer, leads her there in the dark, surrounded by the hum of a machine that has never been gentle with her. Now, Missy understands. Maybe, all this time, it was just humming, _groaning,_ missing the lost half of its pair.

_Yeah,_ Missy thinks as she strokes a bit of a wall, _me too, dear…_

The door reacts to her touch, makes itself visible, and unlocks to let her in. It was supposed to be a surprise. Without a cat to take care of, without classes to prepare, without a companion and friend to spend time with, their life had only taken place between seconds, inside the Doctor’s rooms, already furnished and ready for takeoff. Missy’s only home was full of ghosts, anyway. But she’d thought… that perhaps the Doctor’s was, too. She’d hidden away a room, built artificial light inside to mimic that of a main sequence star, as if it came from windows right opposite the door, and whittled an instrument with her own hands.

She would have handed it over, only reluctant in appearance, and pretended once again to hate the music that the Doctor would gently flick into existence. And they both would have known that the Doctor has always been aware that Missy never hated it.

Before Missy, the guitar awaits its own song.

“I made you so she’d have music,” she mutters—she speaks to an object that weeps out the love Missy whittled _into_ the wood and not away, “when she was finally ready to travel with me.”

She stares at the emptiness between her and the instrument, the silence that would have been filled with acoustic notes, which would have still reverberated with the passion of the Doctor’s own electric guitars. Today, silence is the language they speak, the language neither want to be speaking.

Awkwardly, Missy picks it up from the floor, where she lay it seasons ago.

Even with all the time in the world, she never learned to play guitar. She always levitated towards the piano instead, infinitely more grandiose to both her ear and hands. Once, she spent an entire winter in an abandoned cathedral somewhere she still can’t pronounce, working on an organ until she could revive the trapped notes inside it. Anything as opposite to mechanical as a guitar, string and wood and the magic of experienced fingers, resisted her since she was a child intent on mastering everything.

But now…

Music’s music. And she’s the Master.

In the otherwise empty room, she struggles until she finally manages a recognizable tune that her hearts can only listen to, making themselves small in her chest because the alternative is unthinkable.

“Oh, what a friend to have on a cold and lonely night,” she sings along in a mutter, in a loop of sound that barely echoes off the walls. “Oh, what a friend to have…”

The tiniest meow interrupts her.

Missy glances at the door and watches it open as Arthur pushes it forward to enter. She almost smiles. Of course he can do that, she never input him for the TARDIS to interpret as an intruder to the room. And she didn’t because, like most of the time, she forgot he was there.

The Doctor bought his food. The Doctor played with him in the darkest hour of the human night, even when neither cat nor Time Lord were very keen on each other. Missy just watched them both, cuddled Arthur when he let her after getting tired of the Doctor’s strange love language, and she made sure to walk as quickly as he did so he wouldn’t have to make the trip back on his own.

Even now, Arthur only ever watches her for a moment before he comes in closer, wondering what she’s doing and why she’s alone. If she was sitting down anywhere, he’d leap on her lap, and she wouldn’t be able to look into his eyes for more than a few seconds before welling up.

Her hands shake and she has to put the guitar down before she accidentally drops it.

“She’s really gone this time…” Missy says.

Arthur takes a few tentative steps forward until she’s sitting down on the floor, then he comes rest between her knees.

“If she could walk through that door right now…” Missy says to him. For a moment, she almost believes he can understand her. “D’you know what she’d say to us? She’d deny the evidence and insist that between her and me, I like you less. Because I let her try harder to like you.” Missy sniffles in her tears, a faint smile on her lips. “Now she’s gone. She’s not even here to tease me about how wrong I allegedly am.”

Arthur puts a paw on Missy’s shin.

“Love you too, you beautiful idiot alien cat.” She sniffles harder this time. She knows he can’t understand, so she just scratches his head once, where she knows he likes it, and jumps up to her feet, wiping her eyes off with the back of her hand. “Come on, then. We do have to get her back. We have to get her to love you best. Otherwise… what good are you, eh?”

She’s rested enough. To mourn like this, now, is to delay.

Past the closed doors and through the many corridors in the dark, Arthur walks at her pace now, looking up at her from time to time. She doesn’t even bother telling him to scram. What for? Who would she be being that rude for? Children and pets follow her around, the least she can do is let them.

The room where she has kept the original hotel matrix welcomes her by making her wish she’d destroyed it all. Every last piece of machinery that’s been scraped of something else to fit into a plan that she discarded time ago. Every blueprint of a rift artifact that controlled the vortex in Cardiff and won’t budge to her many attempts to hijack the coordinates it’s bound to, without which it doesn’t even turn on. Missy smells the waste she herself has produced these days, the mess of a useless summer working incognito, and her feet refuse to take her any further than the door.

Arthur meows meekly at her once he’s inside. She wonders for a moment if he can feel the dead time energy that brought him to Bristol by mistake, because Heather got to playing with forces not even the tools designed for that do it well. The cat paces slowly between a few wrinkled blankets, paper sheets, and the giant matrix in the center of the room, until he reaches the small few copies of the rift artifact she made and sniffs at them.

He meows again.

“What?” Missy mumbles. His head fixates on her. “It’s pointless, it’s physically engrained to work _only_ in that blotched city.”

His blink is so slow, so deliberate, that she has to roll her eyes at him. She’s having a conversation with an alien pretending to be a cat. About something that, at this point, the cat probably understands better than she does.

“None of them are functional, Arthur.” Missy sighs. She finally enters the room, the room she’d call her home if she still had any of the sentiment inside her to seek it. “Not even the ones designed to hold no coordinates.”

What rift would it _control_ , without it being set to monitor one in particular? Where would it open to the time vortex if it wasn’t from a point in time and space?

This time, Missy’s gasp swallows Arthur’s meow in the echo of the silence.

“ _Oh…_ Oh, oh, oh. You brilliant, stupid brain,” she mutters. “What literally sails the time vortex and _can_ not exist in a fixed point in time and space? What are we standing on!?”

Missy twirls, arms stretched open, eyes closed. She can hear the drums of her heartbeat, the blood pumping more than oxygen and more than a plan. The fire inside her that drove her once and now has to drive her again, if in a different direction.

She crouches so very quickly to grab one of the coordinate-less rift artifact copies and put it in her jeans pocket. Then, she holds Arthur up in front of her face.

“I’m going to save the Doctor,” she coos to him, “and I’m going to keep _you_ safer than she would, were it the other way around. Tell her that from me when you see her, and prove to me she really does speak cat.”

* * *

“Good to go, then?”

Bill’s arm circles Heather’s waist, protectively. For the past couple of days, when Heather has been allowed out of her bed, Bill hasn’t really stopped trying to hold her, just in case she fell, even though she knows Heather won’t. Especially now that she has been officially discharged with a clean bill of health.

Heather nods at Bill’s question, then opens her handbag, frowning.

“Wait,” she says. “I think I forgot my charger in the room…”

Heather takes a deep breath as if she was braving up to another flight of stairs. The hospital lifts are mostly almost always crowded, and they have just come down.

“It’s okay,” Bill says. “I’ll get it. Don’t go anywhere.”

“And where would I go?” Heather smiles.

“Just sit down, eh? Won’t be long.”

Bill runs upstairs.

They’ve been practically living in the hospital. Heather, because she had no other choice, and Bill… because she wouldn’t choose otherwise. She’s grown very thankful for patient nurses, gentle doctors, the cleaning staff that let her have a minute more after visiting hours were over, and for empty waiting rooms to spend time in while Heather was being cared for. She would have liked to call a friend to have a coffee with downstairs in the cafeteria as she waited, but… somehow inviting them into the weirdness of a hospital felt inappropriate. And the ones who knew never showed up after Bill asked them to give her and Heather some privacy.

A cleaning cart has been parked by Heather’s room, so Bill knocks before letting herself in.

“Sorry, we left something here…” she says.

By the table on the window, the cleaning staff must have left it there, very visible so that they wouldn’t forget later to take it downstairs to Lost & Found.

She quickly goes get it, trying to minimize her presence as much as she can, and while she walks by the window, her eyes wander for a moment, distracted by a flicker of the light out in the street. Her hands pick up Heather’s charger only because she remembered telling herself to.

A woman in an oversized blue shirt and jeans walks out of a telephone booth that had definitely not been there before. This neighborhood’s only telephone booth is broken and half a mile away, and very much not green and cyan.

Bill is barely aware of herself leaving Heather’s hospital room and heading to the reception area where Heather was waiting for her.

“You got it?” Heather asks.

Bill gives the charger to her.

“We got lucky,” she says. “I think we might be getting a lift home.”

“From who?” Heather says, looking out into the parking lot that stretches right in front of the hospital.

It’s then that, in her blue shirt and jeans, looking like a hurricane of grease and exhaustion had poured down on her, Missy walks inside, right in front of them.

“Hey, Heather, glad to see you on your feet. Bill… We have to talk.”

“Half a week! Yeah, we do.”

“Not here,” Missy says, crossing her arms. “I’ve got the TARDIS parked out. Come on, I’ll take you home. You’re in no condition to go anywhere on a bus like that.”

Heather snorts amusedly.

“Speak for yourself. They wouldn’t _let_ you inside the bus.”

Together, they head out of the hospital and into Missy’s TARDIS, landing just outside Bill and Heather’s building.

“You could have gotten us in, now that you were at it…” Bill grumbles to Missy as Heather slowly faces the few flights of stairs.

“Last time I did that, furniture got crushed underneath a dimensionally engineered time-and-space machine,” Missy says. “Not a very brilliant move in small apartments, wouldn’t you say?”

Bill grumbles something short back and they continue going up the stairs until they get to the door of the apartment, and Heather gets it open, dumping her coat and bag onto the dresser by the entrance without bothering to so much as hang it on the wall, and leans against one of the kitchen counters. Bill straight up drops all her stuff in the corner by the door.

“Can we get you anything?” Heather asks Missy. “Tea?”

“No,” Bill says. “They went AWOL on us after _you_ got hurt. Answers first, then maybe… tea. D’you or don’t you want tea?”

“No, I don’t want _tea._ I didn’t come here for tea.” Missy rubs her temple, hard, and without asking or needing permission, she sits down on the couch opposite the counters.

Bill goes stand next to Heather and crosses her arms.

“Okay…” she says. “Then where were you? Where have you guys been?”

Missy flinches at the plural. She bites her lip so hard Bill’s afraid for a second that she might actually break the skin and make herself bleed again, like the other night.

“It’s been days since I last saw you two…” Bill pushes it. and when Missy flinches again, at the mention of someone else who isn’t here, Bill’s insides go cold at a realization she wishes she hadn’t just had. She can only just mutter it, barely in something recognizable, audible: “Missy, where’s the Doctor?”

Missy wouldn’t just turn up on her own, with a TARDIS whose chameleon circuit does work. She never has done that, they’ve always been a pair, her and the Doctor, coming and going together, even to teach a class that historically has always been taught by one person. The only reason Missy might have come alone this time like that is—

“Someone…” Missy says. She can’t keep her eyes fixed on anything, not Bill, not her own hands or feet, not even the emptiness before her. “Someone’s captured her, taken her back to our home planet.”

“What?” Bill says softly. “Why?”

“There was… a war. The Doctor did something to stop it and when she grew to regret it, she went back in time and froze the planet in an unbreakable bubble, trapping the war and its people inside it forever. Apparently, they didn’t agree much.” Missy laughs without any humor. “They’ve come for her so she’ll free them.”

Both Bill and Heather stare at her, their faces perfect masks of confusion and the indifference proper of someone who doesn’t know, because they haven’t been told. The Doctor made sure Bill never knew. And if Heather knows of the Time War, Missy’s made sure now not to mention Gallifrey and the Time Lords.

She inhales deeply.

“I’m going to break into the bubble and rescue her, but… I need someone to take care of the cat for me. I can’t take him where I’m going.”

“And you thought of us?” Heather says gently.

“Heather just left the hospital,” Bill says. “I don’t know if she’s well enough to be taking care of a cat. An _alien_ cat, at that.”

Missy blinks at her. Of course Bill would react like that, immediately thinking herself on board. But that’s also on the Doctor and her tendency to overthink protection as a one-way road. _No, Doctor, you silly sausage… It goes both ways._ And now Bill’s lack of knowledge about this war, this planet, and the people inhabiting it only makes Bill think of it as any other old stroll through the universe. _What good is that protection for?_

“I can’t ask you to come with me, Bill,” Missy says. It’s the right thing to do, to draw the boundary the Doctor never can, not really. Missy’s brain echoes of war, but her hearts ache for peace. “And I’m not. I’m asking you to stay here, with Heather, with Arthur. Fight the battles you can.”

“If something’s happened to the Doctor that it’s taken you _days_ to come to ask, then—”

“It’s going to be dangerous. A war in a bubble, two murderous races at each other’s throats without middle ground, without so much as _air_ or space to run,” Missy says. This time, her eyes do not leave Bill’s, and Bill could swear a spark of war already burns bright and hot in her irises. “We never told you anything about any of this because she didn’t want you involved. She never does, and it always bites her in the ass. But you’re going to be risking your life now. For her. For me. So you think carefully about what you want to do. You don’t know us hardly well enough to fight a war in our name, to die in a war for us. Trust me on that, I’ve died in a couple of wars for the wrong people.”

And how many have died for the Doctor? Bill has seen them, empty graves in the grass, being mourned and never forgotten, not entirely. Letters piling up, flowers that never wither and die. How long can you grieve when you live longer than most?

Bill knows now the people left behind on Earth would not think her missing, another name that slipped past the control of authorities and administrations. Heather would know, and that’s what matters the most to her. She would be an empty grave, but she wouldn’t be a _hole_ of no answers.

That’s what would have stopped her, before. Leaving no traces.

What stops her now is… Heather herself, left behind alone to await answers that come too late.

Missy’s right. It has to be worth that. Whatever it is Bill would willingly walk into for someone else, it has to be worth putting Heather through that, it has to be worth losing Heather and the prospect of a better house, a better job, and cats, one day.

Bill might not know them much, might not know where they’re from and why they ran, might not know how old they are and why they regenerate their own bodies, but she knows one thing, and it’s that they matter. To each other, to her, to the universe.

The Doctor let Bill join her small TARDIS community, despite the reticence now Bill understands the Doctor must have been fighting, and befriended her over alien investigations and astronomy lessons. The Doctor let her fulfill her human longing for the stars, for more, and made sure she was safe meanwhile, even if it made herself look cranky.

The Doctor strolls across stars and planets, but that is not all that she experiences. She notices the small things that need fixing, and she does more than her best to get them fixed, before anyone has even asked, before anyone has even said hello. She saves it one step at a time, but all of it at once. The Doctor pushed past her own discomfort and personal history on those cliffs to help a local and a sea creature come clean and solve a mystery. The Doctor defended Heather from two old friends of hers, without context or need for it, and proceeded to make sure that everyone got what they needed and that everyone stayed as _safe_ as they could be.

The Doctor’s the whole universe to Missy. And Bill would bet a star or two she wouldn’t have to live and die saving it to continue to be.

It’s Missy, above all, that Bill feels a duty to. The Doctor deserves to be rescued, she is owed. But Missy… Missy’s who was there for Bill to talk to, to come to when she wanted to learn anything new. Missy’s the one who knelt by those ugly metal floors in the warehouse and struggled hard so she could help Heather out. She has to return the favor, and struggle as hard as her body and mind will allow, to help the one Missy loves.

They are both owed.

“I’m not letting you go alone,” Bill finally tells Missy. She thinks about the concept of that bubble and the war inside it, then remembers Missy and her unfathomable machine, Missy and her subtle flinching every time the Doctor walked in, as if the room and the machine inside were somehow a secret out in the open. “This is what you were working on? All this time? How to get to…?”

Missy nods quietly and, because Bill might as well know, if she’s coming with her—they both might as well know—, Missy says the name out loud:

“Gallifrey.”

“I have no problem taking care of an alien cat,” Heather tells them. She glances at Bill, “but… It’s _Gallifrey,_ Bill. They were sequestered to some far-off corner of the universe. That doesn’t _just happen._ They’re well-enough known for their warring. I can only imagine what’s happening now if they can’t escape their own planet…”

“You know of it, then?” Missy says to Heather.

“Everyone has heard of the Time Lords. Except here on Earth, where humankind’s collective memory is so wonky one would think it’s a joke. Because they’ve _been_ here. They’ve been everywhere.”

Bill exhales a couple of times, trying to make sense of all of it.

“So…” she says to Missy, in an attempt to backtrack to the last thing they said that connected to the Doctor. “Why did you want to get there? If you knew about the war, if you didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“They’d taken someone else. The one who came before you,” Missy only says.

And it really is all she has to say for it to click inside Bill’s mind.

“Clara,” she says. “Clara Oswald. That’s who they took. You said someone had gotten ‘hurt’ before me, except—oh, fuck… She disappeared with no warning, everyone in my class thought she’d just sort of quit because of how much the kids bothered her with that Mr. Pink business. But… oh, god. That’s why you were so obsessed with never going anywhere with me, in case they…”

Missy nods solemnly.

“The Doctor always suspected they’d come again. But never… We never suspected they’d come _for her._ ” Her voice is almost feeble, almost a thread of it in the silence of the room. It would be almost impossible for Bill to believe Missy could sound like that if she wasn’t hearing it. “We never knew they could.” Missy makes two fists on her knees. “They said they _couldn’t_.”

After that, Bill simply packs a duffel bag with some clothes and running shoes, at Missy’s advice to bring everything that the Doctor might have provided in a normal trip, because she doesn’t have it now.

Heather comes back down again to the street with them, since Missy hadn’t brought the cat up with her, and because she can’t let Bill walk off into the terrible unknown without a goodbye that lasts until Missy’s terribly camouflaged TARDIS loses itself in the vortex.

Heather refuses to hold the cat any time before she’s held Bill first.

“Remember where you’ve put your shoes,” Heather says. Bill laughs a wet laugh at that. “Don’t come out of hiding places until you’re absolutely sure it’s safe to, shoot at anything you need to and worry later about the consequences, and run for your life, Bill. I don’t care who you’re leaving behind. You run, and you keep safe and come back home.”

“I won’t need to,” Bill says, trying to smile. “We’ll cover each other. It’ll just be in and out, getting the Doctor back, and coming home. I promise.”

Heather just looks at her. She knows it’s never in and out, so does Missy. But there’s little point in saying anything more about it now. So she just puts her arms around Bill and holds her tight.

“I really, really don’t want you to go…” Heather mutters.

“You’d go for me, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Missy’d go with you. The Doctor’d go with you. They’d help anyone who needed it in a heartbeat, without thinking about it. They _did_. I can’t let them face whatever this is on their own, not after they’ve welcomed me in, made sure I was safe.”

“So you’re just going to put yourself in danger?” Heather says, her voice shriller as she tries to mask her own tears. “Ruin the safety they’ve made sure to build for you?”

“Just a little,” Bill admits. “It’s what I’ve been after since I met them, anyway.”

They hold each other for a long time, after, until Bill’s eyes are no longer dry and Heather has no more tears to shed on Bill’s shoulders, no more strength in her arms to press her against her chest.

Goodbye is impossible to say, so it’s never said. Bill kisses her gently and squeezes her fingers, before a cat is dropped onto Heather’s arms. Before Bill walks into Missy’s messy TARDIS.

A proper trip, without stabilizers on her bike, is all Bill has ever wanted, of course it is.

_But not like this._ Never like this.

This time, in a hum that’s more a groan than the vibrations in the Doctor’s TARDIS, Bill can feel it. It’s not just any old trip in the vortex, drums of war permeate the very air they breathe.

She leans on the console, next to Missy.

“How are you going to do it, then?” she asks. “Break into the unbreakable bubble?”

“Connecting the rift artifact into the TARDIS navigation systems, tweaking both a bit…” As she talks, Missy continues to fiddle with elements on the console, adjusting things Bill cannot hope to ever comprehend. “And hoping I’ve increased the speeds at which this thing can travel enough so that we’ll pass cleanly through. At least the rift artifact will make sure we’ll travel undetected till we’ve landed.”

“Will it work?”

“If it doesn’t, at least it’ll be a quick death. I’ll make sure to take your body back so they can bury you at home and you won’t drift off in the opposite side of the universe,” Missy says, never more serious.

Bill cracks a smile at her.

“And are you ready?”

“Not in the slightest, kid. But I’m already four months too late to pulling that bloody lever and sneaking back home, so I’m just gonna have to be.”

* * *

“Clara!”

“Doctor! It is you, isn’t it?” Clara Oswald, far enough away in the opposite side of the wall. The Doctor wasn’t sure but now she knows. They’re in Gallifrey, at the mercy of a bunch of war-hungry Time Lords. “They’ve put us next to each other… Doctor, listen, whatever you do, you do not leave that cell. They’re going to come and—”

“I’m so sorry, I’m so… I’m so sorry. This shouldn’t have happened, I should’ve stopped it.” The Doctor says against the wall, a defeated mutter to herself. Then, she raises her voice so Clara will hear: “I’m stopping it now, I’ve my…” The Doctor reaches inside her black suit jacket but finds her pockets empty. “They took my sonic! Never mind. Clara, I’m getting you out of there.”

“No, Doctor, you _can’t_ , you have to listen.”

But she’s not. She hardly ever has to a word Clara has said. Clara’s voice is enough for her to gather strength she doesn’t have, cognitive dexterity it takes time to mold out of the corners of her mind after being awake for too long, and set out to try and figure out a way out of here and into Clara’s cell.

* * *

A dozen warnings and the tolling, that old tolling of the bells, have taken presence and protagonism over the console room.

“Brace yourself now!” Missy shouts at Bill, next to her, over the noise.

Bill stares at the monitors. No one’s supposed to look at the vortex from the inside out, but at this point, does it even matter?

The moment is coming that Missy’s going to brake and land, far too quickly, and break through an unbreachable bubble. If Bill wants to watch that, let her.

Both of them hang on tight to whatever they can, and Missy engages with protocols that are a very low percentage of what she was taught in the Academy. After all, a TARDIS does need six pilots, and she’s been flying solo all her life. The shaking that follows is nothing like the instability of past landing sequences.

Floor, walls, the console itself. The tolling gets louder. The warnings beep and beep and swallow all their fear, but not their screaming.

Bill keeps her eyes open. To see.

To witness first-hand the moment in which Missy handles the hardware of the machine, and in the monitor, there it is, an obstacle that won’t budge. The TARDIS breaks, and the TARDIS groans louder than ever before, but the barrier swallows them whole. The TARDIS doesn’t crash.

Past the beige curved dome in the middle of a vortex, orange skies break the dawn into shades of color that never once existed on Earth.

Bill’s shaking fingers loosen their grip on the monitor.

“Yeah… I think you did it…” she says with barely a breath left on her.

She gulps and looks at Missy. Missy and her undone hair, the bags under her eyes, and that manic light in her face when she smiles and bursts into chuckles.

“I’d tell you I never want to do that again but, frankly?”

Bill pants out, trying to catch her breath.

“We do have to if we want to get back,” Missy finishes.

“Nice prospect…” Bill mutters. “I think I’d just… rather die here.”

“You don’t mean that,” Missy says. She supports herself with both arms on the console and just lets her head hang low for a moment or two. She glances at Bill once or twice. “Don’t just stand over there looking pretty, rest as long as you can. The second I open those doors, all rest is over. Forever.”

Bill tries not to think about that and does as she’s told sitting down on a chair and letting her head rest between her knees.

A few minutes later, when the doors of Missy’s TARDIS open to the desert, and the warmth of a planet at war brushes against her face, Bill knows in her own heart what Missy meant.

How could anyone ever close their eyes in a place like this? A gigantic city of metal dwellings, like skyscrapers, awaits in the distance, its structures so titanic they appear to be closer than they really are. And around the entire sky, acting as a horizon of sorts, a translucid beige barrier.

“That’s the bubble,” Missy says, pointing at it.

She locks the TARDIS behind her and lets her sonic sunglasses hang in the collar of her shirt.

“That’s what we could have crashed into…” Bill mutters.

Giant spaceships that remind her of UFOs fly around it, both small if they’re up in layers of the atmosphere she’d have to think hard to name, or enormous if they’re low enough to reach the metal city. A few of those ugly saucers seem to even have been… cut in half by the bubble, rendered permanently immobile by it. Bill wonders idly if whatever lifeforms inside it have been, too.

“Dalek ships,” Missy explains, as they get moving towards the metal city. “The rest of their fleet must have been trapped outside the bubble.”

They walk in silence for a while, just listening to the distant shooting of some saucers into the mountains and their own feet on dirt and sand, then Bill asks:

“Why didn’t we just fly the TARDIS inside the city?”

“This is the place that built the TARDISes,” Missy replies curtly. Her face is contorted in half a grimace of concentration and pain that Bill can’t quite fathom. She quickly returns to lead their pacing into the city. “They’ll probably already know an unidentified TARDIS flew in. It’s better we go on foot from now on if we want to infiltrate the Citadel as undetected as possible.” She sighs when she notices Bill’s not following. “Come on…”

* * *

The Doctor slams her open palms on the wall, drags her forehead down on it until she’s not even sure if the wall’s holding her up or she’s holding up the wall.

“I never should have let it happen. I never should have let you out of my sight, not even if you asked,” she says. “I never do that. I never do as I’m told…”

“Doctor, you’re not _listening_ to me,” Clara insists urgently. There’s footsteps on the corridor, outside their cells. “It’s you they want. It’s always been you! And now they have you, what do you think it’s going to happen next?”

The Doctor’s cell manifests a door. Soldiers march in without much of a word.

“Ah, company,” she says with a smirk she’s not really feeling.

“Doctor, what’s happening?” Clara screams. “Are they here? Don’t let them do anything, don’t you dare let them take you with them!”

The soldiers, dressed in full armor, as if ready to go out there and fight the enemy on their own, approach the Doctor by the wall and don’t hesitate. They grab her by the arms and haul her towards the door.

“And here I was thinking that you’d need me to have some dignity for this,” the Doctor says.

She thrashes in their arms, tries to stand up on her own, to have some power back and some ground to stand on inside her cell.

“Didn’t you need me to help out with the war? Isn’t that what your bosses needed me for?”

They keep her down despite her best efforts, they keep her on her knees and let her have them scraped by the floors.

“Not feeling very talkative, are we? That’s okay.” She puts all her strength into nullifying their pulling, to remain in the cell, but they pull harder and get her out. “I don’t need you to talk to me, silence can say a lot to people as well, you know?”

She’s finally dragged into the full light of a corridor. Whites and blues harm her eyes for a second.

“Doctor!” comes Clara’s voice from inside her cell. And her face. Clara’s cell has a window, a tiny one. Her small, round face, worn by the months spent inside here, has been allowed this small gift. “Don’t let them have what they want!”

It’s not a bad last sight, the Doctor thinks, even as her knees and legs give out from struggling. She lets them take her wherever they may. To see Clara one last time, that was a small gift as well, one she didn’t think she ever would have. It’s a pity it had to be like this, in such a place, at such a time. At least the Time Lords kept her alive this long.

“Get Ms. Oswald’s execution formalized,” one of the soldiers says bluntly to his intercom. “She won’t be of any use to them now that the Doctor’s awake.”

“No!” the Doctor says. She thrashes again. She’s been known to win even when it was impossible. Hand-to-hand combat, even on her knees, is never impossible. She’s older, stronger, and more pissed off than two soldiers in the Citadel ever could imagine, even if they know who she is and what she’s done. “You can’t. I refuse! Not until you’ve dealt with _me_!”

“And what do you think this is, Doctor?” the other soldier says, not even bothering to look down at her. “You’re being _dealt with._ ”

* * *

The levels of the Citadel. A labyrinth for anyone who hasn’t walked it a thousand times before, in disguise and in the shadows, just to play games with a dozen other students. The danger of getting caught never did put her off and now… now it’s just an _incentive_ , burning her alive from the inside, making her wish it could come sooner.

Or it would be. If she were alone, if she’d already let the fire win.

Bill hides behind her, watches out for her signal to hide in the refuge of columns and walls and doors, and dashes across short-cuts of corridors that feel like they’ll never end. Levels and levels of corners and obstacles for anyone not native to the place to get caught and be doomed to await the final spider bite. The one that kills you and traps you inside its belly.

Missy moves around all of it like a spider herself.

“Is this where you and the Doctor are from?” Bill asks her once, when they’re hidden away, safe enough from the soldier patrols going up and down, well aware of intruders and yet not caring enough to look for them actively.

Missy, her back to Bill as she keeps an eye on everything she can, sighs visibly. This, she didn’t want out there, not like this, in the literal heart of Time Lord history and victory.

“Yes,” she says, simply. There will be no fanfare, as there is no pride, these days, in being part of a race that rampages with everything they find and think to own.

“You… you fought this war. The both of you,” Bill says.

The fact that it’s not a question makes Missy turn back to face her. Some of this—all of it, really—has always been overdue with the three of them.

“On opposite sides,” Missy says. “She fought… well, not _with_ the Time Lords. She fought for Gallifrey, I suppose. Until she didn’t. And I allied myself with the Daleks, until I didn’t.” She exhales. “It’s a very long war, Bill. It lasts for very, very long. It never ends.”

In bits and pieces, Missy tells her. Not about all of it, because that would take all the time they do not have, but some. Details that perhaps got lost in the moments spent in Bristol, playing at human games and with human minds.

They move slowly down the Citadel of the Time Lords to the sound of Missy’s story, and the deeper they do, the deeper Missy’s frown becomes, almost a ridge in her forehead.

At some point, Missy has to stop and lean on a column, only when she’s absolutely sure nobody is around to see.

“You okay?” Bill says.

“I think I know where they’re keeping her.” Missy pants slowly.

Bill looks into her blue eyes. The fire that burned in them before… Something else stirs in them now. Missy leaves a hand up against the wall, to keep herself steady, and doesn’t look away from Bill. She isn’t sure she has ever told anyone this, or even really spoken of it before, since she was a child and used it to win at hide and seek—used it to beat the opposite team during war drills.

“I can… _sense_ it.”

Bill stares at her, without any judgement in her stance or in the way she looks at Missy. But, then again, Bill has always known. It would have been very hard for her to miss. For anyone in their vicinity to see and not realize, even if they hadn’t been aware of the history. Life’s more than just a past, life’s grandly spent in the present.

“That’s another Time Lord thing, isn’t it?” Bill asks.

“Yes and no.” It is, more than anything, a Doctor-and-Master thing. “Telepathic,” Missy explains, touching her temple with index and forefinger. “In proximity, I can feel her. It’s like… it’s like her signal and mine could somehow tap into each other.”

Her face hardens once more in that grimace that cannot have foreseen anything good, and Missy hurries them along without another word. The more they speak, the easier they will be to spot, and these corridors are far narrower, far more patrolled than above. What is being kept around here must be of some value to them.

And what is being kept a few chambers further…

That, Missy grits her teeth at the single thought of. Half a thought, even.

A choral of footsteps come at them from behind. Bill pushes Missy into a cranny that hides them just in time. Their breaths, held for the duration of the footsteps echoing around, press hard against their lungs.

“I think they’re gone now…” Bill says.

“What the hell are they doing? Because they’re so not looking for us. An unidentified TARDIS having flown right past their protective shields has to have thrown them off, it must have. But… they’re not _busy_ with that…” Missy mutters.

They both straighten up again. Bill’s eye catches some movement out the corner of the corridor.

“There,” she points at it, forward and to the right of the cranny they hid in. Squinting a bit in the distance, she tries to make something clear out of it. “Missy, that’s _Ms. Oswald_! That’s Clara, Clara Oswald.” She leans in as close to Missy’s face as she can and hisses angrily: “What in the name of _the Milky Way and far beyond_ is my high school English teacher doing _here_?”

“Being trapped by my people.”

“Here?”

“What did you expect? Bars and a toilet without a door and a police officer in the corner eating donuts?”

“But that’s a normal _room_.”

“No, it’s not. It’s a cell. And this…” Missy waves her index finger around, “—is not the cell area. Trust me on that. I was brought there often enough.”

They approach the cell carefully. Clara is still anxiously peering out of her cell into the light of the corridor.

“How are we going to get her out?” Bill says. She looks behind her. Somewhere around, she can still feel footsteps coming. “That looks like a solid wall.”

“Door’ll only come through if we have clearance. We don’t. But…” Missy puts on her sunglasses.

Clara, on the small window, presses a hand on it as well.

“Hurry,” she tells them. “There’s not much time.”

“Yeah, yeah, hurrying, dear…” Missy whispers as the sunglasses whir softly.

A few seconds later, the door has manifested out of nowhere and a soft click has unlocked it.

Clara emerges into the open corridor spewing out words not more than a second later, in the same clothes Missy remembers her wearing the last time they saw each other, surrounded by all that ash.

“You need to listen to me,” she says. “They took the Doctor, I don’t know where. And it’s not good that they took her, because why would they have made her a prisoner for so many days before? Why not take her there directly and do whatever they needed? Why not bring her to the Council, if this was really just matters of war? Why did they put her here and then…?”

Bill puts both her hands on Clara’s shoulders. She’s much shakier, her bones way more protruding under her touch, than Bill has ever seen her. Whatever they’ve done to her in there for so many months, it wasn’t humane or kind. Bill’s might be the first friendly face she’s seeing in all that time, and somehow that’s so wrong, Clara was the teacher. And now everything’s backwards.

“Ms. Oswald, hey… It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine now,” she says slowly. She’s not sure if Clara has memories of those corridors in the TARDIS, lost to time and to space for hours.

“So this is _when,_ huh?” Clara says, even managing a tiny smile at Bill.

“Yeah.”

“Did you figure out the number yet?” Clara asks.

“Thirteen,” Missy just answers, before quickly asking what they really need to know: “How long was the Doctor in there?”

Clara takes a deep breath.

“A few days. She was unconscious, I think. I kept shouting at her whenever the soldiers would leave me alone, but she wouldn’t respond. Then as she came to, I was trying to warn her, and they took her. They said they were coming to execute me next.”

Missy looks behind them at the far end of the turning corridors now.

“Yeah, that’s probably what’s coming at you next.” She pushes Bill back to the direction they’d come from so she’ll push Clara in her turn. “We need to leave. Now.”

It was a mistake, all of this, taking people with her. Missy’s the only one that knows the layout of the Citadel well enough to navigate it safely, unrestrictedly, even when guiding someone. But now they have a third person to make sure makes it out alive. This was never the plan. Missy’s not even _sure_ what the plan was. Doctor first, then maybe coming back for Clara, if anything. To be honest with herself, Missy had forgotten about Clara. Clara, who’s probably been in a cell for a few months and won’t be able to run very fast without tiring. Clara, who has an execution squad after her.

Bill and her, they’re both human. Humans aren’t supposed to be on Gallifrey in the first place, they won’t be given any quarter for aiding a prisoner.

As they hurry along, Bill lets Clara take the lead for a second to stay back and talk to Missy.

“Hang on,” Bill says, “why are we going back? I thought we were close…”

Missy urges her on.

“You need to get back to the TARDIS,” she tells them both. It wasn’t decided. She never decides things if she can. Not in situations like this. But now it’s not just her, and she needs to. She has promises to keep. Two girls to bring back home. “As slowly as you can, but safely.”

“What? No!” Bill growls.

“I’ll walk you there myself if I have to. I’ve got time.”

“You really don’t…” Clara says to her. “I’ve heard them talking, all this time, when they came to my cell. Whatever it is they’re doing to the Doctor, you’ve got anything _but_ time, Missy.”

Still, Missy just pushes them so they keep moving. That’s all she has to do, keep them moving, keep them hidden if anyone comes, and get them to the TARDIS. Everything’ll be easier from then on. She has to believe that.

“Why?” Bill asks.

“Because Heather will kill me otherwise,” Missy just says. Any hint of humor she tried to garnish onto the sentence dies the second she’s said it. “And because… once you’re there, I need you to program something onto the materialization systems for me.”

She explains it, then, another jewel in the crown of the Master. More than just a selective materialization that grabs a person inside the TARDIS, what she’s built is a mechanism to home-in on someone outside of it and bring the TARDIS nearby. But it was always designed as a two-pilot system. Because she was counting on the Doctor to pilot with her.

Until the end of time. And what if time ends now?

“But you’ll need to fly it manually,” Missy finishes telling Bill and Clara. Either one of them would do, but she’s not telling them that. She needs them both safe inside that TARDIS.

“I’ve never flown a TARDIS in my life!” Bill argues. “I wouldn’t know how.”

“I’ll tell you. It’s simple, really. All’s just there already, you’d just need to press a button. The TARDIS’ll do the rest.”

“I can do it,” Clara says.

“She can do it!” Bill echoes. She turns to Missy with a determination that almost flatters her. “Let me come.”

“ _But_ ,” Clara continues, almost glaring at Missy for things that haven’t happened yet, “you need to promise you’re coming back. With the Doctor. For us.”

“I’ll do all of that, you just need to _move._ Now. Or neither of us will ever do anything again.”

Reluctantly, they begin to leave the first corridor behind.

“How can you?” Bill spits at Clara. “You’re just… giving up?”

“Look, Bill… I was there when she was being dragged away. If she couldn’t do a thing, could we? Even Missy won’t be able to. But… she’s more durable than you or me.”

“So we let them both get captured? Is that it? Is that what you’ll _teach_ at school when you get back?” Bill says. “Run and be the lone survivor, rather than stay behind and help your friends live, too?”

Heather’s words ricochet in her head. Perhaps, after a long time getting exposed to alien ways, this is what happens, people lose their ability to care for others before they look out for themselves. Bill’s traveled little, and right now, she’s never been more thankful. She might acquiesce, but she doesn’t _agree._

“There’s no need to argue with each other,” Missy says, grimly. “I’m the one asking you to do this. Be angry at me…”

Silence and footsteps act as the echo of that, as the only thing that stirs up the mismatched anger, then—

“I love her, too. I saw her, barely more than a lifeless body when they threw her in. I don’t want this. But I couldn’t fight like this. I couldn’t even run.” Clara snorts softly. “I’m done for if they catch me. I don’t want her to see me like that, like I saw her.” She sighs. “All I can do for her now is help in the distance, so I will.”

“Sometimes… all we can do is stay aside, Bill. If they catch you, you won’t even be bait anymore,” Missy says. “Clara was going to be executed.”

“And they won’t execute _you_?”

“Oh, probably. But I _am_ more durable than you. By quite a few lives. It’ll be all day before they can really kill me. And to do that, they have to catch me first.”

Bill breathes out of her nose, loudly.

“They won’t,” she says. “Promise us that much.”

“They never do. Besides, no prison can hold me for long.”

Missy stops walking to look them in the eye. Both. The impossible girl who Missy herself made sure was possible for the Doctor to meet. And the girl who dreamed of so much more, who fought for it all, and who once again has to settle. Because the alternative is a risk Missy’s not willing to take or let her take. She makes herself promise one day, soon, Bill will get her universe and more. Safe, beautiful, and terrible.

“Right now, nobody can help the Doctor better and more stealthily than me. It’s not my first time doing this. She was always rubbish at getting _out_ of places and messes she’d gotten herself into.”

* * *

Smooth floor under her fingernails is the first sign that something’s way more off than before. Nobody gives much thought to the preciseness of the floor tiles inside the cells. _You left your own already, remember?_ The sound of her own inner voice reverberates through her own skull in waves of regained consciousness, and pangs of pain in the back of her head, where they must have hit her.

She almost laughs out loud. That’s been a terrible mistake, knocking her out so she won’t know where she is until she’s come to. _Or so you wouldn’t put up a fight._ She had tried to. Why? There’s something there… Something way rougher around the edges than this floor. This floor’s almost comfortable to lay on, why would anyone ever leave it?

It is very, very nice. Neither cold not hot at touch, the perfect place to just be. Better than most floors she’s slept on. And with so much space around her, she’d say. If she opened her eyes, she’d know for sure.

_Don’t you want to know? Just a little bit. You can sleep, after. But… ah, the where is important when you don’t know. You love knowing._

She does love knowing. She does keep biting her mental tongue at that thought that nags her in its absence. Why knock her out? Why did she put up a fight? When it’s so easy, so, so easy to just…

Beneath her, the floor begins to warm up, and in the close distance, a door opens and closes, the echo of its weight dragging across the floors magnificent inside the room.

_That’s it! A door opened._

A door that turned the cell into a corridor. Solitude into promises of torture. Of death. But not to her, no. _Clara…_ The only reason she’d put up a fight to getting caught. Someone she loves getting punished if she did the opposite.

The Doctor inhales deeply. Her fingernails stop caressing the floor. Her palms dig into it as she opens her eyes to get her bearings, and she propels herself back on her feet.

“Greetings, Doctor. We have been waiting.”

Terrible white floods the entire room. The few times the Doctor has ever walked in here, it was night, and security measures made sure it was hard to see and move around. Now, she has to blink away the reflex tears forming. No doubt an increased punishment thought of especially for her.

Even so, they’re not hard to make out. Gat and a team of people she doesn’t recognize, presumably Time Lords as well, working for the High Council that has not wanted to miss this for the world. She grits her teeth. The minds behind it all, finally making their appearance in a corner of the room, with their pompous outfits and their regal pose, stolen from the people they stomp on and war day and night against the interests of. She has grown up under their rule, speaking their names in reverence at first, then running away from their decisions, fighting actively against them, harder than anybody else on the planet.

The Doctor dedicates them all a glare. It’s personal.

Not many reasons could have led them to order the soldiers to bring her here, of all places. Not many _actions_ can be taken in this chamber. And not many the President himself would want to be witness to, perhaps even have the last word about.

“Our… advanced unit came back not long ago with the news that our most famous child refused to answer our call for aid in this war.” It’s not even the President who speaks. Some lord in his lord-like clothes and his lord-like accent, pretending to be something he’s not because nobody will be, not as long as the President lives, and the President will live forever. “What have you to say to that, Doctor?”

“Wouldn’t really call me ‘famous’. Notorious, maybe. Infamous?” Her voice, chilled and calculated, resonates through the room.

Old statues of past members of the Councils, past Presidents, stand at either side of the platform where she has been laid to rest on when unconscious.

“You have some nerve, pulling this,” she continues, twirling around. Every single square inch of the chamber will be accounted for in her head. Every single one can be an escape route, if she needs it to be. And she will. “I’m sure some of you remember the many enemy fleets, about to overwhelm the planet. And thirteen TARDISes making sure that never happened. Or isn’t that why I’m here?”

“And you, in your many forms, made sure to _trap_ several ships belonging to one of those fleets inside the planet with us, giving neither them nor us chances at retreat with your… bubble.”

The Council had failed to intercept her that day, and in their solemn promise to govern from superiority, not responsibility, must have kept secret from the rest of the planet her intent and final success to clone Gallifrey before its original end. Those in the room when the transfer of a planet and the consciousnesses on it was made should do a lot more than scold her for it, feel relieved their plans have somehow brought her here. A Doctor on Gallifrey out of turn has never once been a matter of any sort of premature celebration.

“As if you’d ever take any chance at retreat! As if you’d need it, too!” she replies. “Apparently, you lot found a way to break through, didn’t you?”

“Enough!” exclaims the President. He emerges from his entourage to address her personally. “You know why you are here. You have been asked to undo what you put into place, as today you remain the only one that can.”

“Real waste of time and resources bringing me here, then, mate, because I won’t.”

Gat clears her throat, then glances at the President.

“Her decision appears to stand firm,” Gat says, “as reported.”

“Well, then…” the President says. “If you will not help us win this war, Doctor, then we will simply have to force you to collaborate with us.”

The Doctor bares her teeth at them all.

“And how will you be doing that? You can’t harm me here.”

She stands on neutral ground. Even if they activated the powerful software inside this chamber, that would only delay her, not stop her. She and Missy played with the machine often enough, she knows neural pathways to escape its mind-numbing force even when standing at its center. They cannot confuse her with that.

The President ignores her. He nods at Gat’s team. One of them disappears from the room before the Doctor can ask anything.

“Just remember… we did ask first, Doctor. We really did.”

Beneath her, the floor comes alive, buzzing gently with something all around her, under her. She tries to step off it, but as she does, many presences knock their ways into her mind as harshly as winter wind blows against bare skin. They invade, they rummage, and they grab at the controls in her brain to have her kneel, to strip her of strength, until she’s back on the floor, fingernails raking it up and down in a futile expression of rage.

“Don’t fight it, it’ll be worse for you if you do…” someone says.

She doesn’t even know if the words are spoken aloud or in her head. She doesn’t even know if her eyes are open, if she’s seeing the room swirl, or if it’s an effect of the Council’s minds ruining her own, square inch by square inch.

The Doctor punches the floor. She digs her knees onto it. She arches her back. The room has ceased to spin because there is no room anymore. And she has stopped breathing because if she does, she’ll be letting them win. She’d rather force her regeneration on them than let them have this.

_Don’t let them have what they want,_ Clara told her.

She has to walk out of there. She has to.

“Doctor…” It’s not even harsh anymore when they call to her, it’s just… full of pity.

She manages to get a foot on the floor. Her head is a pool of uncertainty, of yes and nos, dos and don’ts, and a giant loophole of what she can and can’t see. It swirls in place of the room, and it hurts where they hit her, except… now it all just hurts. Inside and outside.

The Doctor breathes out in waves so shaky, were there a ship sailing inside her lungs, its sailors would drown. Her breath makes waves of the last of her consciousness, as her fingernails strike the floor, up and down, and she thinks to herself that it was nice, that it was good, that she tried.

She had always wondered what it would feel like to die, to really die and never come back again. She closes her eyes, alone now in the loophole inside her mind as the floor buzzes with energy below her, and she knows in her hearts that this will probably be the closest experience to her final death she can ever witness while still being alive herself once it’s over.

Then, in barely a moment between heartbeats, without her even being aware of it, the Doctor’s gone. And the chamber’s quiet, the lights falling into dimness, almost in reverence, almost as if they knew.

* * *

_Maybe, in the end, I haven’t failed you._

The two last companions of the Doctor and the Master are inexorably safe inside an inexorable machine, with the knowledge to do what Missy can’t on her own.

_Yes, maybe I haven’t. Maybe this time, for all those times, I’m saving you._

The hero who was born to play the villain until someone offered her a hand. What if she’d just needed the someone to lose a hand, or to need it?

Missy faces her history alone. Fields of orange and beige and brown. The colors of their childhood. Where they ran, where they fought, where they dreamed of bringing down empires and saw their foundations crumble, once, but on opposing sides.

Now, when she closes her eyes, delving deep into the fortress of her people, her true enemy, Missy’s thoughts search for her and whisper in titillating spirals what Missy herself needs to hear. _I’m coming for you._ She can feel the Doctor on the other side, but not like before. Fainter than ever, and not at all aware of those words in her own mind.

There’s shortcuts in the Citadel for those who know to wait, tunnels behind walls that no one uses, because they belong to times so ancient hardly anyone remembers the original layout of the buildings. But Missy was curious, and sleepless, and her nights could only be filled with wonder and excitement if she snooped around until she found Gallifrey’s secrets.

_Not all of them,_ she thinks now.

If she’d known the war was but a façade to the Council…

She laughs to herself. When she did find out, when the Doctor told her, a part of her wanted to join them. She’s always wondered what it would feel like, to be given the sweet release of death. Only ascension would mean never really leaving one’s consciousness behind, just… never suffering again for what it had done.

But all those other secrets the Council kept, passages covered by concrete and plaster and marble and metal, she trusts to take her directly into the heart of the Citadel’s history.

She places a hand on the right spot, where she knows a panel hid, once, which should activate it even through a layer of new wall. It’s almost comical, how even in a fortress like this, you can move around without weapons or tools, if you’re familiar enough with it.

It’s finally manifesting the door, when the sound of soldiers approaching has her press herself against the flat surface, eyes following every last movement around her.

She’s close enough to where she wants to be. A few steps more and they’ll find her. She should have been quicker.

“Hey! Over there!” a soldier tells the other.

Missy moves away from the wall, dusting the material off on her jeans.

“Caught me…” she muses. “Red-handed at my crime scene. Oh, this brings back memories.”

One of the soldiers speaks to his intercom.

“Sir, we have the intruder. What are your orders?”

“Scan,” the intercom replies.

Missy doesn’t think. She lunges at them, between them. In the tangle of limbs, even armored ones, she can scurry away, enough to run far and fast enough. She pushes through.

One of the soldiers grabs at her waist, bringing her down.

“Scan her! Now!” he tells his partner.

She kicks up at them. If she lets them scan her, it’s over. They will know enough to draw the right conclusions. Her feet get caught in the soldier’s hands. She’s pulled back towards them, then forced through a quick scan that lasts so very long when she’s waiting for the final doom of the day.

“Time Lord,” one of the soldiers reads off the scanner to his intercom.

“Accounted for?” comes the voice, in an affected Council-like accent, from the device.

“No, sir. Her face is unknown to our registers.”

The voice in the intercom booms with heavy laughter that echoes inside Missy’s ribcage like a life imprisonment sentence.

“We have a duplicate of the Doctor’s TARDIS in the desert, a Time Lord whose face remains unregistered, and a very old feud always to be disputed before us.” The Council member chuckles once more. “Bring _the Master_ to the Matrix. She will at least prove useful to us and act as the final test.”

They know. And they’re playing with the information they’re very aware _she_ doesn’t have now.

“What _test_?” Missy spits at the intercom.

The soldiers grab at her to stand up and urge her to walk on. There will be no shortcut, they will take her to the Matrix the regular, boring way.

“What test, you band of unoriginal order-following pricks?”

“To see if the Doctor’s new long-term memory works as it should,” they say curtly.

Missy lets them bask in their words for a moment before she actually loses herself in a guffaw or two, for much longer than she remembers being able to laugh.

“You can’t meddle with the _Doctor_ ’s brain, she’s always been the strongest of us all. At least work on your bluffs before you come to _me_ with them _._ ”

It’s such a ridiculous notion. Nothing touches the Doctor’s mind, not even the most powerful grief. And these power-hungry lords think they can just tap into it and fiddle with what they want? They think they can _make the Master believe that_? She bursts into laughter, more than once, on the way to the Matrix Chamber.

They’re keen on keeping the details coherent, she will give them that much. But they’re losing the same game they’ve forced them all to play. Because Missy can feel her now, her signal stronger than ever, vibrant and almost… fire-like, burning like a main sequence star fuses in the universe. The Council has nothing against that. They never have. They were glad when she left Gallifrey, and now they want her help but can’t think of a better way to acquire it than betrayals and games and riddles.

Missy’s throat aches from all the laughing, all those attempts at stopping, when the doors of the chamber open for the soldiers that are dragging her inside.

Gat and the Council await inside, nicely tucked to the side of it all, casual observers of the game in the brightness of a room that Missy’s memories always recall in permanent darkness, always so difficult to find her way through.

And… at the center, on the main platform, now activated, Missy doesn’t even have to _look_ to know for certain it’s the Doctor. Without eyes or ears, without even much more of a body than synapses, she could feel the beat of two hearts, the consciousness of a mind whirring at Doctor-speed, and that warmth beyond the physiological, beyond the merely understandable by science, that can spark fires in an instant.

Missy’s pushed down the last of the grand staircase, almost falls before her. She wouldn’t have minded. Her public displays of devotion begin and end where the Doctor sets her foot down. Kneeling is as much public as it is spiritually private.

The Doctor stands small as she is on that platform, yet grown in something much less puny than size. Not confidence, because the Doctor can fabricate doses of that which might kill larger animals than those that exist on Earth. Perhaps arrogance. Missy smiles. The Doctor was always a tad more arrogant in front of her so-called betters, for the sake of playing the game.

Beneath her feet, on the same platform, she has even discarded a handgun, probably given to her as a gift for the war.

_Idiots,_ Missy thinks, rising up herself to face the Doctor from below. _The whole lot of them._

The Doctor hasn’t touched a gun with the full, unobstructed intent to use it since—

“Now,” the President speaks aloud. Missy turns to meet his eyes. She didn’t remember him as looking so… insignificant. With her and the Doctor in a room, how could he not look so? She’s surprised, though, that his eyes find the Doctor’s instead and not her own. “Let us give you… the new face of the Master.”

With a wave of the gauntleted hand of the President, the floor beneath the Doctor lights up.

Missy looks into the Doctor’s eyes and finds them vacant where she’d expected a myriad of information to be relayed back to her, all in the moment previous to the Doctor’s head lolling back, and her body falling against the floor, almost breathless, as the floor buzzes.

Missy, free now of soldier hands on her, climbs onto the platform. She lifts the Doctor onto her lap and cradles her softly. Her fingers tread through strands of blond hair, and she waits for the floor to stop trembling beneath them.

They’ve put the gears of the Matrix to work on the Doctor.

They are still playing their game, thinking she will buy it.

_But what game are_ you _playing at that you’re following their rules so diligently, huh?_ She thinks as she watches the Doctor’s face. _You always hated other people’s rules…_

Missy has never told her that, in sleep, every single worry that piles up on it during the hours she’s awake melts into something unquantifiable. They both have always played at who slept less and who slept worse, but deep down, it was just a ploy to get the other to sleep _longer._ And Missy always knew the Doctor needed it the most, because she’d always slept the least. Now, in the realm of a void, the Doctor looks at peace, and Missy wishes it were ever as simply as that. As just waiting for a magical machine to take your burdens away forever. But the burdens return. And they weigh twice as heavy upon reentry.

The floor eventually ceases to churn below them, and the Doctor takes a breath that makes Missy’s stomach tremble enough to put the Matrix to shame.

“Welcome back…” Missy says.

She slides away, to let her have some space as the Doctor sits up, hands supporting her weight on the platform. She’s not breathing too quickly or too heavily, which Missy thinks it’s a feat and a sign that whatever’s going on, the Council can’t fake their way until they get away with it.

“Now, you have a lot of explaining to do, because I really understand about 25% of what’s going on. Not gonna lie, I don’t like feeling like you must feel all the time, but—” Missy says, chatting away to distract herself from the many pairs of eyes, silent watchers who have not moved from the room all this time.

But it’s the Doctor’s silence that stops the breath in her lungs, the words in her mouth.

“Okay, maybe not _all_ the time,” Missy mutters. “No need to point a gun at me.”

That vacant stare Missy thought crowded her senses… Something else populates the Doctor’s gaze, something ancient that Missy hadn’t been on the receiving end of for very long, for almost two bodies, and many, many lives.

Missy calls her by her name, then: “This is not funny.”

The Doctor’s face hardens.

She walks slowly, very slowly, in a stance that has never existed in this Doctor’s body—regal and exhausted at once, dragging herself through life with a purpose that drives her and sinks her at the same time.

“Do not presume to _ever_ speak that name again,” the Doctor finally says. “Not after what you’ve done, not after coming here, in spite of that.”

_No…_ Missy thinks to herself. _No. No, it can’t be._

The last time the Doctor had touched a gun with the full, unobstructed intent to use it on her had been—

The Doctor’s free hand, her left, pulls at her red scarf in a quick tug until the last of it has ceased to brush against her shoulder. She crumples it, holds it tight in her fist, and drops it to the floor.

Missy says her name aloud again. Missy says all of her names. The name given to her at birth that she forsook, the names she chose for herself growing up in the Academy, the name the universe knows her for.

“What are you doing?” Missy says. “What on _earth_ are you doing?”

Not even the mention of Earth is enough.

The Doctor takes the final step, she raises the handgun, aligned perfectly with Missy’s chest. Even with two hearts, if Missy’s hit right between them both, she will die quickly.

“What’d you intend to do with that?” Missy mutters.

She knows… when the last time was. She spoke those words as well. She knows the Doctor’s answer won’t be any different than it was back then either.

“I have to end this. And I do it without choice.”

“If you pull that trigger, it’s not without choice, sweetheart.” Missy looks up at her, her expression hardened as well, because she can’t do this otherwise. She can’t face her raven with her feelings anywhere but in her sleeve, where they should be, where they _were,_ then, even from her own self. “Nothing’s ever done without choice, Doctor. You taught me that. So choose well.”

How she still manages a tender smile at the Time Lord she loves, the Time Lord who now is entirely gone from Gallifrey, Missy will never know.

It’s what she will die on, a smile for what is lost.

For a single second, a tiny quiver in the Doctor’s fingers around the gun, Missy almost believes she’s still there, somewhere, fighting for control against her own past self. She almost believes she will be spared this time from death at the hand of her friend.

The smell of gunpowder, the round hitting the floor, the pain in her chest prove her wrong. Yet she still smiles.

It’s the Council’s game, there’s just one more player now, one new set of rules.

Her body thuds against the floor when she falls. It doesn’t even hurt, not as much as the past being reality again. What is dying when you can live again? When everything you hated is now everything you _hate_? Dying is a transaction, a card to play. She has to play her best.

“Take her to a cell,” the Doctor’s voice says. Missy can hear the gun being kicked away, people beginning to leave. Gat and her people, the Council, the Doctor.

Blood pools in her chest and throat. She can’t breathe now. A bit longer now and… All that energy pools beneath her skin, waiting for release, to become porous as well and ascend, transcend, then end.

Missy forces it back inside when rough hands drag her up the stairs, her head hitting every last step on it. They’ll want her watched over, now. They’ll want to know what she looks like, next. To use her in their schemes with the Doctor, to have her play a role. Perhaps even to do the same to her and make her forget all that history.

_The corridors have such pretty ceilings_ … she thinks to herself. She’d never even realized, never even looked up. She was always so worried about who was coming or where she was going, she’d forgotten about the designs painted on the ceilings, the stories debossed in Gallifreyan over the paintings, told for people to forget about. But she doesn’t want to forget.

A door clanks open, and she’s thrown inside. A room without pretty ceilings, just grey dusty material that doesn’t even have fake stars on it. _I hoped there’d be stars…_ she thinks. _Aren’t there always stars? When you die?_ She can’t even remember she hasn’t died, she can’t know.

It’s coming now. Any second.

And she’s surrounded. People watching. She can feel them. She can’t open her eyes and see, but she knows.

If she regenerates here, if she lets them see, she will lose everything again. She can’t keep losing it all and keep getting back up after, she’s not the Doctor. She doesn’t have the Doctor now.

_Who do I have?_

Porous yellow fragments her skin, and Missy’s answer comes the only way it can: crashing.

Because she’s called it, maybe not in the way she designed it to respond, but it’s here. The vortex has ripped open for her to walk it. And now it’s here, her groaning TARDIS.

Now, it’s dematerializing her away from the gray cell, materializing her inside its safe walls.

Into Bill’s arms.

“Did we do it?” Bill sputters out. Then, she takes one quick look at the state Missy’s in, at the bullet wound seeping blood in her chest. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Missy—”

Clara spots the energy first. Clara must have seen it before, because she grabs Bill and pulls her aside, even when she tries to fight.

“I’ll be okay…” Missy manages. It sizzles now. It cannot be stopped any longer. The frontier between alive and dead she has walked before, and it has never hung so heavy in her hearts. It was never the Doctor, sending her to walk it. “More durable than you, remember?”

“Back!” Clara shouts at Bill when it happens.

When the yellow becomes almost fire, and it spews out of Missy’s every pore, up into the very ceiling of the console room, against every wall, brushing up against the floor, hot and burning.

“What’s happening?” Bill asks past the noise.

The TARDIS tolls in response to being burned by the Time Lord that inhabits the spaces within.

“She’s regenerating!” Clara says.

It tolls and it tolls. Maybe it mourns as well.

By the time it dies down, Clara and Bill have hidden underneath the console, and beyond the clearing smoke emerges the new Missy, the blue shirt now no longer oversized, and her jeans only slightly less so, and much shorter on her legs.

Short hair and the shadow of a beard that will soon grow, brown skin, long eyelashes for dark eyes that they know, instinctively, were not born this sad, and slimness in her new width. Her voice has dropped to a new, heavy, warm tint of sadness, as well, when she speaks to them:

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t let them see me change.”

She looks down at her hands, so much bigger than before, and sighs.

“I look like I used to, don’t I?” she says. “I’m no longer just Missy.”

Bill, the only one who has seen, nods once.

“Then… let me go back to the pronouns I used as well. To the name that made me. The name she gave me…”

The Master takes one full breath and, in doing so, his back shakes, his arms shake on the console he’s leaning on.

“What happened?” Clara asks softly. “Why did you wait to regenerate?”

He breathes out slowly again. He doesn’t bring himself to look them in the eye and what he does tell them, he tells them in mutters.

“If they had seen, the Council, the Doctor, what face I was to acquire… they would have been able to use it against me.” He sighs heavily. That is not it, and he knows as much. He can’t just leave it at that. “The Council—they did something. They’ve tampered with her memories, done the unspeakable.” He tries to steady himself for Bill and Clara, tries to face them now, to be true, but he’s utterly vanquished by that truth. He’s not sure they will understand it as it really is, anyway. “They’ve regressed her back into the early War Doctor… And that’s the last person she is, the last person I want her to be.”

Clara makes a small noise in the back of her throat.

“Yes…” the Master says in response.

“But…” Clara says. “I met the War Doctor. He wanted to _end_ it. He did. Or didn’t. My Doctor, he… he put Gallifrey in the bubble to stop himself from burning it all down. I don’t remember much, but I remember him.”

“They’ve erased that from her as well.” He sighs again. “Those were the final days of the Time War, Clara. The early days… We fought. Hard and ruthlessly. Both of us.”

He walks to the chair, the mirror of the chair where he used to sit down in the Doctor’s TARDIS, and takes a seat.

“But…” Bill says. “Why did you keep your new face from them? I still don’t… get it.”

The Master leans back on the chair.

“Do you remember I told you the Doctor and me fought on opposite sides? In the early days, they thought me a traitor here, which I was. The Doctor _thinks_ it’s the early days, and those in the Council aware of who put the bubble there and why will make sure to keep up the pretense. I don’t know what their original plan was for her, maybe to force her into the war and experiment on her brain until they found what she neglected to give them. What I do know is that now that they know I… came for her, they’re going to come after me, because it plays into their little historical game of Doctor-Master, and because I might have information they need. They’ll send _her_ to get me _._ ” He sighs for a few seconds. “If any of them knew this face, it would make it easier for them to find me, to tamper with her memories of me again.”

“But they saw you escape anyway, didn’t they?” Bill says. “They know you’re out there.”

“They don’t care. They wanted the Doctor to help them break the bubble. She can’t do that with just one TARDIS and without equipment, without memories. They’ll see that in time. All the Council wants is to ascend past their stupid planet, break the universe.”

“Ascend?” Bill asks.

Clara looks at her. She has heard that word before, here and there, but never quite grasped it. Even the Time Lords themselves would have had trouble with it, unless they’d longed for what it meant.

“Into becoming creatures of consciousness alone. Free of bodies, free of time, of cause and effect, while they let creation destroy itself,” the Master explains. “Originally, in the final days of the war, if the Doctor hadn’t stopped it, they would have brought hell down on the entire universe. It would have simply… ceased to be. They would have let their enemies rip the entire fabric of time and space apart while they ascended, perhaps even ripped it apart themselves. Now, it _should_ be the final days, chronologically, but the planet’s been zapped out of its regular orbit, and there’s just a few surviving Dalek ships both inside and outside the bubble. Every other enemy of my people must be somewhere in Gallifrey’s old coordinates, wondering what happened to the mighty Time Lords, or looking for them to restart the fighting. Only they won’t be able to as long as the bubble remains intact.”

The Master takes a deep, calming breath that does very little to actually calm him.

“The war’s just their playground. If children die in it, what’s it to them? They’ll ascend and leave it all behind, leave their own people at the Daleks’ mercy. But they’ll send the Doctor after me, trust me on that. We were always so much more than enemies, even to the public eye. They know she can find me better than anyone else, even without knowing what I look like.”

He actually smiles at that. He can work around it like he always did in the past, but does he want to? It would be the only way, right now. She’s become a soldier, a piece in the Council’s masterplan, soulless and mindless, just following orders like the rest of them. She doesn’t even have history other than the violence between them to draw from. She raged at the mention of her name being spoken by him. Once, it would have pleased him greatly, to get under her skin where it hurt, where he could make it hurt because he was unable to make her happy otherwise.

“So what do we do now?” Clara asks, hugging herself.

“Nothing…” he says. “There’s nothing _to_ do. Go home, live your lives. It’s over.”

Except… for him, is it? Does it have to be? Does he want it to be?

“No, it’s not. There’s still something,” Bill says. “You said you were enemies, right? And that she’s at a place where that’s all she remembers. Then… pretend to be her enemy and gain her trust that way, get her back with us.”

Of course, Bill has no idea just how right she is. The only way to call the Doctor’s attention and stop her from being a soldier to the Council is… slowly warming up to her the way she and the Master always warmed up to each other in the only past that the Doctor remembers now.

But does he _want_ to do it?

“Not just pretend, Bill,” he says, closing his eyes as he leans the back of his head on the wall. “It’s not so simple.”

He would have to commit the atrocities the Doctor, in the early days, knew him for. He’d have to do it all again, all that madness, all that chaos that rot at his hearts for decades and centuries on end. Evil for the sake of selflessness. For the Doctor. Because she has forgotten them all. Her friends, her enemies, her once enemies turned friends, turned family, turned more. The Doctor is truly, for the first time, alone again. Thrown back into the war she loathed and didn’t want back in, not even at the cost of the people she loved.

It’s not even about whether he _wants_ to do it or not.

The Master _has_ to do it.

All that red in the water, all that fire and smoke in a Gallifrey he didn’t burn down, in a Gallifrey he began to burn. All those dreams in which the drums echoed louder than ever, the thirst for more taking over his mind, his body, his soul.

This is where they lead. A choice.

_Choose well,_ he has said to the Doctor.

Little did he know.

_And what will_ you _choose?_ , he says to himself.

“I’d have to _be_ who I was, then,” he mutters, for Bill and Clara to hear, to know. “You didn’t know that side of me. Neither of you. Not even on the cliffs, Bill. I was a wretched, poor thing that craved death and didn’t know how to ask for it, only knew to seek it in the destruction of the foreign, the emaciation of the self, and the quest for validation in the Doctor. There are stars you will never see shining in your skies because of me. Black holes that should not exist yet do because of me. Races that died without leaving a trace of history behind them except the torture chambers where I bled every last one of them dry. Wars that have gone on indefinitely because I fought in them, died, and was reborn to fight in them again. That’s the person the Doctor remembers now. That’s who I’d have to become.” He smiles faintly at them. “It’s not so simple.”

And yet it is what has to be done. Now he sees. His own downfall, a cascade of truth slipping past rock into the abyss. A cascade of evil he cannot stop, he should not stop. The path, he knows now, was not set in stone by fate, by the dreams madness put in his head, but instead it is a road he will willingly walk for the Doctor he loves. For the Doctor, he will do anything, even undoing the progress that was so hard for the monster in him to accept at first, and so relieving for the person within to embark on.

“Okay…” Bill says. “Then we’ll help. We’ll help sell the lie. It’s the least we can do.”

“There has to be something we can do that isn’t as extreme and that will convince her you’re as you were,” Clara says, “that will get you to a confrontation and then… to a state where we can, I don’t know, talk to her. Just talk to her… The Doctor can’t forget us all, she can’t forget _every_ thing.”

_The Doctor can’t forget all those people she loved and lost._ Bill flashes back to all those names in the graveyard. _Who will remember them now?_

“There is,” the Master replies, suddenly struck with realization. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Find a way, lead her back to me without letting the extremes ruin either of us.” Because there is no other way she will come to him and face him; she will never answer his call unless the call is violence and ruthlessness and someone else’s pain. He will have to create the illusion of it and risk everything, everything except the Doctor’s own life. “But you can’t do it with me, I’m sorry.”

This is Gallifrey, their home, their childhood. Their war. No one else’s. And he won’t let anyone else die because of it.

He suddenly gets up from the chair and heads for the console, for those controls that he needs in order to take them all back.

Does it change anything at all if he’s not truly falling, but jumping and in control of where he wants to land? Will he know just how to narrowly avoid the emptiness that aches to pull him in if he’s playing with the fires from his youth for the love that drove him to get burned in the first place?

“Plus,” the Master says, shaking the thought away, “I’ll need someone back on Earth, to help me plan my moves. And that’s more important than going out there to look for her, potentially endangering all our lives. Now I’m one life shorter than I was before, but I was always enough of an idiot to risk it anyway, always have been.”

He lifts his head to smile sweetly at them, at the two humans who, despite everything, have stuck around in their exhaustion, in their confusion, and still stubbornly refuse to leave this alone.

“I need that to sound good enough for you both, because I really will not take you with me to confront her,” he says.

Clara and Bill glance at each other, then breathe out slowly.

“Alright, just… keep us on the loop, okay?” Bill says.

Clara’s too tired to say anything. Besides, she has much more pressing decisions of her own to make right now.

He wishes it all were simpler, in the end. That he didn’t have to present them with a clever lie to assuage them, that he could promise he would come back one day for them with the Doctor, that he could put them back into the world they came from without asking them questions that have no real answers. Without offering solutions to problems that can never be solved.

Before he gets the TARDIS flying away from the bubble, back into the vortex and towards Earth, he has to ask Clara.

_When? When do I bring you back?_ With the twist that now, because Bill has seen her, it cannot be the exact time Gat kidnapped her, but precisely when Bill Potts left high school to never have to return.

Or many, many years into the future, so neither family nor friends will still be alive. So she won’t have to explain to them why she has been gone so long, and where she has been.

_Choose well,_ he had said to the Doctor.

Sometimes, even the best of choices is a terrible one. But you’re still left to choose.

* * *

“Did you… did you do it?” Heather asks.

She has Arthur on her lap. He seems content enough to snuggle with her, in a flat with windows to the outside world, all taken care of.

Heather has offered the Master tea again, and he has gladly accepted a cup this time.

She and Bill sit opposite him. They have taken the barstools, because they’re the hosts and he’s the guest, so he should be in the couch, or so they said.

“No,” he replies now. “I’m sorry. That means I’m going to have to ask you to… keep Arthur for a little while longer. If that’s okay.”

He could take the cat where he’s going, but he doubts Arthur will appreciate being left alone for that long, without anyone to play or snuggle with. He’ll be happier here.

“Don’t worry about that,” Heather assures the Master. “We’ve become friends.”

“I’m glad…” he says.

Between him and Bill, over tea, they break it to Heather. The failure, the defeat. It’s even worse when he has to tell it like something objective, untainted by personal history.

Heather doesn’t know the Doctor. The loss of all those memories is just… a mere bleep for her, whose knowledge of the Time Lords begins and ends with war.

She clings to Bill, regardless, when the new plan is retold for Heather to hear.

“More active warzones?” she asks.

Bill nods. “Most likely, yeah. We’d be going into the eye of the hurricane this time.”

“You’re not, Bill,” the Master reminds her kindly.

“I know what we said,” Bill insists. “But… Clara’s not here now. She’s home with her family, she’ll be safe there from all of this. _My_ family—” She glances at Heather, holding back so much in such little time. “—knows about this. It’s different. I don’t want to settle here when you’re risking so much on your own.”

The Master puts the cup on the coffee table.

“Sometimes it’s not about settling at all, sometimes it’s just about saving your life, and that’s fine. It’s got to be.”

“But you’re not. You’re going out there!” Bill insists.

“Yeah, well…” The Master looks out the window, into the quiet city of Bristol, where aliens pop out of nowhere but the sky never falls from where it should always stand. Because for as long as a hotspot existed in it, a traveler with a blue box defended every living thing within. “I owe her that much. She insisted upon _me_ for 900 years. Time to return the favor,” he says softly. All those trees moving in the wind, below. He wonders if they feel the turn of events, of planets, as he does. If they suffer the sluggishness of it as much, too. “I’d go on for 900 centuries more for her.” He glances at Heather, her fingers quietly combing Arthur’s orange fur, back and forth in a gentle motion. Bill does as well. “I’m sure you can relate to that.”

The room falls into the rhythm of old trees and a planet’s rotation for a while, then Bill breathes in a little louder.

“You were lying about having Clara and I help you plan, weren’t you? You’re not coming back for either of us.”

The Master’s silence is enough of an answer. He stands up to leave, unable to say what he wants to, unable to mean it, and walks past them, towards the door.

“Will I ever see you again?” Bill just asks, her voice breaking slightly on the last very sound her voice makes. And it’s not a question about just _him._ The plural is not evident, but when it becomes clear, it shatters the silence as if it were glass.

He turns around slowly to face her. His head hangs low as he speaks.

“I will do my best so that you shall,” he says. “She did always say… my best would make me good. Funny, that…”

He remains by the door for one second, then laughs to himself, aloud, because he is, after all, going away to feign and embrace evil for the Doctor. It doesn’t last very long and, eventually, he does have to open the door and leave Bill’s home.

He never hears or knows of it, but in that very moment, Bill thinks to herself that there has never been anyone like him, ready to sacrifice everything, his morality, his quest for betterment, so he can save the Doctor.

She hopes he’ll come back one day, after all, so she can tell him out loud. Properly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Hours, days. Weeks wouldn’t make a difference. The Doctor has gone where Missy cannot follow. Not yet.” LOTR reference to Sam’s legendary _Don’t go where I can’t follow_.
> 
> Definitely one of my favorite chapters to write for this series <3


	14. Epilogue

A renegade from long ago, a chief player in a slow game, and now, after years of being the mouse to their cat, the Council has summoned her to the Citadel.

 _We have the Master,_ was their bait.

She took it. She took it gladly, blowing a life out of the Master’s rotten eternity for the betrayal in favor of the Daleks, for the many knives in the back, and for the years that can’t ever come back. The Council should have seen to keeping an eye on everything from then on.

She stands among them now, like hardly ever before, welcome only as a promising war hero, not as someone who has already burned high and bright for them. It doesn’t bother her, not while the Daleks fly free above their heads.

“As you know,” a general informs her from the Council’s table, “we believe the Master is the mind behind the barrier isolating Gallifrey and may have found a way to travel through it on his own, perhaps even infiltrating a few enemy ships at the time.”

“They are most definitely growing in numbers, yes,” another Council member adds.

“Have you questioned her yet?” the Doctor asks.

A few faces in the table share nervous glances.

“The Master… escaped our imprisonment during regeneration. Had you not fatally injured her, then—”

“You mean to say you’ve _lost_ her?” comes Gat’s voice with a hint of sarcasm, from the door, hidden in the shadows.

“Her current location is unknown, yes.”

So this is why she has been summoned once more. The Master. The only other name that might as well be hers, only it isn’t. Whenever it is spoken or thought, the Doctor should follow, or skies fall around it like crumbs of bread pulled apart between two anxious fingers and under the force of gravity. If the Master has run away, stealthily as always, even from her own people, then skies _will_ fall.

But the where, the when… Finding out is an art, perfected by trial, error, and time.

The general clears his throat.

“We will be needing to apprehend her again,” he says. “Her knowledge of the bubble is unsurmountable and, to this day—” Many eyes in the Council’s table fix on Gat. “—none of our engineers have been able to match it.”

The Doctor throws her head back so her hair won’t be in the way of her eyes.

“That won’t be a problem. I will find her for you.” No one else can. The Master is master of many things, but disguise in plain sight ranks high on that list. If she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t. Except by the only person she only half-hides from. “This time, however, please make sure the prison’s in stabler conditions.”

The Doctor leaves the Council room and its permanent so-called regal darkness.

“Gat,” one of the members calls. “Make sure the Doctor’s ship’s returned to her from…” He makes a short pause, then exhales, as if smiling to himself. “Repairs.”

In the long corridors of the upper Citadel from where the Council calmly watches a war brew, the Doctor lets Gat’s quick footsteps approach her. Gat’s team of engineers have been set to breaking through the barrier, unsuccessfully, and now are left to wait for the Doctor herself to bring them answers.

“If I may, Doctor,” Gat asks once their paces have replicated one another on the way to the workshop where the Doctor’s TARDIS has been kept as it was being repaired in order to install the hardware that will permit it to travel through the barrier. “How exactly do you plan on getting a hold of the Master?”

The Doctor doesn’t have to think that answer through. Their system is old. Before the barrier, before that bubble that circles their entire lives, it was so very simple, so much more so that giving it a name now makes it feel cheaper than it is.

“Anachronisms,” she tells Gat. “The maddest, cruelest anachronisms.”

The rest of the way, they both remain quiet. She’s not even sure Gat herself has traveled through time, she’s not sure she could understand the linguistics that envelop a traveler’s use of that which is anachronous.

Down at ground level, the workshop is nothing to underestimate. Gat’s team organizes tasks in a corner of it, desks piled almost on top of each other from the lack of space, as the Doctor’s TARDIS, surrounded by cables and wiring, occupies nearly the entire other three fourths of the room.

“She should take you through safely now,” Gat says, arching an eyebrow as she glances at the machine. “We implanted a recent modification of the original pieces, and it hasn’t been tried before on a fully-functioning timeship, merely teleports, but you _are_ an experienced pilot.”

“You could say that…” The Doctor approaches her TARDIS, placing a hand on the door.

It opens for her without need of her to use a key. Funnily enough, she can’t remember where she put it, she will have to make new copies.

“Good luck, Doctor,” Gat says, firmly.

She doesn’t acknowledge the courtesy and plainly enters her own dimension, not bothering to unplug the outer cables. They will simply remain as they were once the ship takes off.

For some reason, breathing in the air from the console room stirs something in her she doesn’t recognize. She shakes her head. It hasn’t been that long since she walked in here, but having to put distance between that TARDIS and her always costs her a little too much time, and it takes her longer to recover than however long she was away.

The TARDIS hums a tiny grumble her way as the systems wake up around her.

“Hurry it up,” the Doctor mutters. “We have an old friend to find, you and I.”

It’s just the two of them now, in a break from the fighting and the dying she can’t ever stop unless she fights and dies harder than any of them, and she’s already _died_ once in this war. She might even grow to feel thankful for this assignment and for the chance to be recognized as something more than an old rebel in the eyes of her superiors. It’s all she’s ever wanted since she left.

The TARDIS complains, as if somehow her thoughts were apparent.

“No, I wouldn’t leave you all abandoned if I was finally accepted around here…” she says.

That is all the TARDIS needs to hear. In her many monitors, information begins to pour in. Dates that never match as they should, planets slightly out of their axis, events that have ceased to link with the one coming next, races disappearing off historical records.

Her hearts have never weighed light, yet they become lead inside her chest instead of supple muscle every single time she sees the trail the Master leaves behind in a road to chaos.

“Where are you now?” she mumbles to herself, pulling a monitor closer. “Where will it hurt _more_ for me to find you?”

All these years, she’s kept a record. Of the wars the Master ruined and caused and then left behind so they’d go on being waged forever. Of the cataclysms and the deaths. Of the destruction in the shape of lunacy, selfishness, and a desire to _hurt._ Hurt _her_. Because she strived to do the opposite, if she could. Keeping a record hurt her more than all the Master ever did combined. But she had to, to remember.

Then—

A recent warning in the giant system that the TARDIS knows well not to show to her often.

Earth. 1429.

“Way too early in 1429,” the Doctor says.

On the images, there is just data, waves and numbers that track the discoordination between the history that was and the history that is being weaved.

She doesn’t need to see to know. It’s the Master, calling to her. A small disturbance in the fabric of their existence, for now. _What will this grow into?_ The Master will stand by and watch it spark into flames so high, so asphyxiating, no one will be left to breathe their smoke. Because the Master likes a game, and a fight, but what the Master likes best is having an opponent to mess with.

 _Be that opponent,_ every action of his whispers to her. _Meet me, fight me, let me see you bloody on the ground as I win._

  1. Those times… there was already enough blood as to let the Master roam free and set traps for silly games.



The Doctor slams her hand onto a lever, and the TARDIS flies her out of a workshop in Gallifrey, through a bubble and a vortex, into the fields of France. Not because she likes playing along, but because it’s her duty to stop who will not stop otherwise, because in war what choice is there left but fighting in it, and because every step she takes closer to the Master is one step closer to ending the war and going home. Real home.

A vortex. A TARDIS. A lone traveler and time.

* * *

Paris shouldn’t be burning. Not in June.

Troops of the future French king should be riding horses across the country, conquering little by little what might in time be a unified place under someone’s rule.

Orleans, then Paris. February, then September.

Time spoke already. And time spoke with finality, as it ever does. It can be changed, then rechanged, molded to shapes it never existed in. But once it speaks, changing its mind takes knowledge of it, precision, and patience. It takes being even more _final_ than time itself, it takes believing that oneself is more ever-lasting, that one will last until the end of time, and perhaps even after it ends…

Two people in the universe believe that harder than their own people would imagine, they have since they were children. They believed it together to then believe it alone, each for themself. Time has just led them to stand on opposite sides of the very essence of _time_.

“Anachronisms…” the Doctor mutters.

A permanent creak on the hinges of the TARDIS door loses itself on the raging, thunderous uproar of the fires, their flames so high they reach well above the ramparts and towers of the protective wall around the city. No other sound in the world soaps a soul up with guilt, with utter commiseration, as the tongues of burning fire destroying the world, leaving nothing unscathed.

She coughs and coughs to keep out the smoke, the black sleeve on her forearm tight against her mouth, as she tentatively approaches the walls of Paris. The heavily armored doors have been opened, yet no Parisian is coming through, running in desperation, in search for salvation that is neither divine nor miraculous.

And that can only mean that either everyone in Paris has burned with the city or that everyone in Paris is no longer in Paris.

But then, who…?

Her eyes strain against the columns of ashen smoke rising. Up on the ramparts, still, she could not miss the sight of it. The terrible sight that weighs heavier than metal inside her chest, that echoes like drums of war inside her two hearts—a beat not just of blood, not just of sound.

A man, a silhouette against the orange and the gray and the black of Paris’s untimely destruction. And he’s… cackling. Hands up in the air, grasping at it, conducting the flames behind him.

“So this is what you’ve become in your abundant free time,” she shouts up at him, removing her arm from her mouth, even if that means she will breathe in that horror in front of her. “The destroyer of worlds.”

“No, Doctor,” he says, a soft affection—product of too many years of double-edged words, what else—curling in the sweetened warmth of his voice, “that was always you.”

“Aren’t you content with the one at home? You have to come _here_ and wreck what doesn’t belong to you, too?”

He cackles harder, he cackles in a loop of his very proper ways that always get to her. Because they weren’t always, they were just feigned at first, until he became what he pretended to only be for the flair. An aristocrat with a thirst strong enough to have him murder, to have him betray, to have him leave.

“How many times will I have to kill you?”

“Kill me all you like, Doctor.” He opens his arms for her, spreads out his chest for her. Taunting, taunting. “I’m here.” He dissolves into bouts of frenzied laughter. “Did they send you back? Is that it? For me? The _greatest_ honor!” As his cackling dies, the Master sits on the ramparts, feet dangling from the edge. “To do what, Doctor? Keep me, like a dog? Help them, like a slave? Or kill me themselves? Do it yourself, go on. I’ll wait up here, door’s open.”

He laughs softly this time, patting at the stones he’s sitting on, distracted, almost… as if his mind weren’t there in the time they both exist in.

“They all ran, you know.”

She grits her teeth.

“Answer for what you’ve done. Give the Council what they want from you. Stop playing games with me.”

“Don’t you want to know where Paris has gone, Doctor? Don’t you want to know? Because I do. They ran so far, so fast… Where could they all _be_?”

His giggles echo louder than flame.

“Aren’t you ever going to stop? Aren’t you ever going to get _tired_? Burn it all away, what will you be king of, after? A wasteland! If Gallifrey falls because of you, and you get to wear the President’s gauntlet after so long dreaming of wielding his control in your hand, do you really think that’ll change anything? You’ll be President of ashes. And here? If Paris burns, if history burns, what are you standing on if not just _stone_ and _ash_ and _death_?”

The Doctor takes in a sharp breath after she’s done.

“What would you have me be, then? Take your pick,” he says. “So good at that. Choosing, being chosen.”

The Doctor makes fists out of her fingers, she strides to the wall, to the stone stairs to the ramparts, and she does not breathe until she is face to face with him. A face she doesn’t know, a face she already burns because of, deep inside. Old hatred, old history. It all burns, always, and today more than ever.

He doesn’t recoil like he should. Like he always does, afraid to be there the second she breaches their contract never to cross lines that were not ever once drawn. Their war is fought in distances too large to be conceived, or too small to be quantified. Now, he is the one to breach it. To stand too close, to breathe hot near her and not bat an eye.

“You’re so full of rage… Of power,” the Master says to her. “Match mine, then.” His voice burns. Everything burns. “But do you really think you have what it takes, Doctor?”

His voice burns with… with _sadness_. It cannot be.

It should have been said in the most terrifying of coldness, in the knowledge that he meant to taunt and that she could grab him by the neck and throw him off the roof. Such is the game they play.

The Doctor stares into his dark eyes, not understanding. Thrown off a roof herself, the roof where the Council left her to stand, left her to command. Below, in these ramparts, the fire dies down from the bombastic thunder of its flames, and among them, no bodies. Not one single body on the floor, calcinated and burned and lost to a future siege, lost to history before their time.

Statistically, there should have been at least one.

Statistically, Paris should have tried to quench the fires. Or at least gathered to watch them die by the walls.

Statistically, statistically. Math has no answers for the hole in her chest, its scalding edges harder to cool down than flame.

Only an evacuated city would respond in utter silence and indifference to this. And it could only have been evacuated if someone knew of the danger with enough time to avoid it entirely.

“Anachronisms…” she mutters to herself.

June, 1429. History, changed. But not in the Master’s style. She should have found piles of bodies, staked, skinned, sowed. But in this burning Paris, no one’s dead. There’s no war yet, there’s… peace.

And the Master’s at the heart of it all.

Statistically, objectively, historically, that should be impossible. The Master has never known peace.

_Then why is there this part of me that wants to confront the impossibility? This part of me that has already recognized it as the inexorable truth._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here we are again, at the end note of an epilogue. How does this keep happening????
> 
> More seriously, though, _Mercy_ has helped me fulfill a three-year-old dream of mine, to sort of write a Doctor Who season all on my own! So many headcanons will now live rent-free in my head because of that. And so many songs, too; [the series playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nGKBLdSNYNJNZc4tH8TQi) keeps getting longer!  
> Because I am Like This, the first chapter of the final fic in this series is already up, following the events in _Mercy_. For a while now I’ve wanted to write a DW trilogy and I guess the time for that has finally come ^^
> 
> Thank you for reading this far, I hope December’s being kind to you <3 (and if you read me from a different year, then I hope the post-2020 future is treating you kindly, too)


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